The COVID-19 pandemic and the role of responsible leadership in health care: Thinking beyond employee well-being and organisational sustainability

The unprecedented crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has posed an enormous challenge ever for healthcare organisations to find strategies to deal with their survival. The healthcare employees are the frontline soldiers to fight against COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, there is a lack of research regarding the conceptualisation of COVID-19 and its impact on healthcare employees’ wellbeing and their organisational sustainability. Extending the role of responsible leadership (RL), this paper develops a multilevel conceptual model to overcome the crisis of COVID-19 pandemic and promotes employee (e.g., workers, nurses, and professionals) wellbeing and organisational sustainability. With a comprehensive literature review, this paper presents five testable propositions and highlights the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on employee wellbeing and organisational sustainability. The proposed model counsels that organisations need to go beyond the simple application of strategic climate and should enable RL to protect and maintain employee wellbeing and organisational sustainability. The proposed conceptual model is a step forward to not only explore future empirical research also will help the healthcare policymakers to take responsible initiatives to increase employee wellbeing and uphold organisational sustainability. There is a lack of research regarding the conceptualisation of the COVID 19 pandemic and its impact on healthcare employees’ wellbeing and organisational sustainability. The proposed conceptual model opens and guides a novel research avenue for the alignment of strategic management (as a moderator) and RL on the relationships among the COVID-19 pandemic, employee wellbeing and organisational sustainability.