LET: Leadership, Enactment & Translation in and across extraordinary events

This project concerns leadership practices in the incident command center (ICC) of the police authority.

The ICC mandates “hybrid” leadership where responsibilities are assumed by different units to deal with extraordinary events.

The purpose of this project is to understand how the mandate to practice hybrid leadership impacts the leadership identities of ICC staff (enactment) and how this mandate is performed in reality (translation).

Research indicates that enacting and translating practices are likely to be challenging in crisis situations, which makes understanding the factors that support and constrain these processes important for national security.

We therefore seek to:Understand how hybrid leadership impacts the leadership identities of ICC staffUnderstand how hybrid leadership is performed by the ICC across and within eventsProvide practical recommendations regarding hybrid leadership within the ICC to improve knowledge of responding to extraordinary eventsWe accomplish this in a three-year, multi-study project, employing ethnographic methods (fieldwork, interviews, workshops) to gain knowledge of how hybrid leadership is practiced within the ICC.

We follow five extraordinary events as they unfold to 1) interview ICC staff about their leader identities over time and 2) observe ICC staff as they organize responses to events.

Our project contributes to the research frontier in the fields of leadership studies, crisis response, and organizing in extreme contexts.