COVID-19 and responsible leadership in healthcare: Thinking beyond employee wellbeing and organisational sustainability

Background: The unprecedented crisis of COVID-19 has posed an enormous challenge ever for healthcare organisations to find strategies to deal with their survival. Extending the role of responsible leadership (RL), this paper provides a multilevel conceptual model to overcome the ongoing and the post-pandemic crisis of COVID-19 and promotes the wellbeing of healthcare employees (e.g., workers, nurses and professionals) and organisational sustainability. Methods: This paper conducted a comprehensive literature review of the existing research on COVID-19, RL, employee wellbeing, and organisational sustainability covering the main contributors to this research stream and their findings. Results: With the development of the conceptual model, this paper presents five testable propositions for determining how COVID-19 may impact employee wellbeing and how healthcare organisations can overcome the pandemic crisis with strategic initiatives enabling RL. The proposed model (see Figure 1) counsels that organisations need to go beyond the simple application of strategic management and should enable RL to protect and maintain employee wellbeing and sustainability of the healthcare organisations. The model contributes to the need for a detailed and contextualised understanding of COVID-19 in the healthcare sector in several ways. First, it helps to understand the challenges of COVID-19 pandemic and the need for RL for the healthcare sector. Second, this proposed model helps to clarify the interventions of RL into organisation’s strategic management to thrive COVID-19 pandemic from the healthcare perspective. Third, it formulates five propositions, including COVID-19 pandemic, strategic management aligning RL, employee wellbeing and organisational sustainability. Finally, healthcare employees are the frontline soldiers to fight against COVID-19 pandemic. This model is a step forward to not only explore the future research avenue for the impact of COVID-19 on multilevel consequences also will help the healthcare policymakers to take responsible initiatives to increase employee wellbeing and uphold organisational sustainability. Conclusions: Currently, there is a lack of research regarding the conceptualisation of COVID-19 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 COVID-19, employee wellbeing and organisational sustainability.