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Leadership and Responses to Organizational Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2015

Stephen H. Wagner
Stephen H. Wagner*
Affiliation:
Governors State University
*
E-mail: swagner2@govst.edu, Address: Division of Management, Marketing, & Public Administration, Governors State University, 1 University Parkway (G275), University Park, IL 60484
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Extract

The tragic failure of Penn State University to effectively respond to years of child sex abuse perpetrated by Jerry Sandusky was both a breakdown of leaders and of leadership systems. Numerous individual leaders at Penn State had the knowledge, power, and interpersonal influence to effectively intervene in support of Jerry Sandusky's victims. However, fully understanding how this tragedy occurred also requires an examination of the organizational system of leadership that enabled each leader to rationalize the cover up of the sexual abuse of children. Alderfer's (2011) laws of embedded intergroup relations are useful for understanding the organizational dysfunction at Penn State; especially when those laws are integrated with other theories of organizational psychology, including the social identity maintenance theory of groupthink, the romance of leadership, and authentic leadership. The integration of these theories suggests specific strategies and tactics for preventing similar lapses of ethical behavior in the future through the development of leaders and leadership systems.

Type
Commentaries
Information
Industrial and Organizational Psychology , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , June 2013 , pp. 140 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2013

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