Internal Publication

Aid worker adaptability in humanitarian operations: Interplay of prosocial motivation and authoritarian leadership

Many field office leaders contend that authoritarian leadership improves the performance of humanitarian operations. The common narrative is that authoritarian leadership helps aid workers more quickly adapt to changes and thus deliver better job performance (e.g., by improving operations in their field office). However, given that field reports often highlight extant leadership as the source of serious operational failures, could leaders with an authoritarian style be part of the problem? We draw on psychological theorizing on the nature of human motivation to address this question. Specifically, we note that many aid workers primarily join humanitarian operations with the prosocial motive to help beneficiaries. While proactive adaptability is inherent to prosocial motivation, we hypothesize that authoritarian leadership may curtail the relationship by impeding aid workers’ autonomy. We find support for our theorizing in a sample of 299 humanitarian aid workers from the field. Additionally, we conducted 31 expert interviews to contextualize and validate our empirical findings. The paper concludes by discussing the findings’ theoretical and managerial implications for humanitarian operations.

Uploaded by: Hassan Montazeri
Author: Salem, Mojtaba | ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6918-2303
Co-author: Van Quaquebeke, Niels | ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6141-4659
Co-author: Besiou, Maria | ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6401-2738
Institution: Kühne Logistics University | Centre: Sustainable Operations for Resource Management and Food Supply (SCO)
Type: Journal article | English | Peer Reviewed
Subjects: Logistics

Published in: Production and Operations Management, 1937-5956
Publisher of document: Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of the Production and Operations Management Society
Date: November 1, 2022
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/poms.13798
Copyright: Mojtaba Salem, Niels Van Quaquebeke, Maria Besiou