Government leaders who want to promote a collective response to disrupting events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, need to foster a shared understanding of the crisis through effective communication. However, the tone and content of communication varies across and within countries and led to conflicting results in terms of collective sensemaking. To understand how government leaders’ messages shape emotional and cognitive responses of citizens, we designed a 2x2 vignette experiment in which we manipulate the framing (pessimistic vs. optimistic) and content of the message (specific vs. general) delivered by a political leader. Results from 436 participants showed that while the tone of leader’s messages has significant implications for the levels of anxiety and evaluation of the government’s truthfulness and its overall response to the crisis, the content of the leader’s message matters less. Furthermore, these effects were particularly experienced by women and left-leaning participants. Overall, our results highlight the importance of the leader’s communication strategies on influencing the public’s emotional reactions, as well as the perceptions of government effectiveness in dealing with the crisis.

Recent theories of public administration emphasize the importance of leadership as shared property. This research focuses on the role of the interaction between vertical and shared leadership in promoting agency performance. Specifically, it examines the joint effects of shared leadership and transformational leadership on team empowerment and performance in public settings. Based on field study data collected from 74 street-level bureaucracies and 423 public servants in Brazil, we find evidence that vertical transformational leadership strengthens the direct relationship between shared leadership and team empowerment as well as the indirect relationship between shared leadership and school performance through team empowerment (a moderated-mediation model). The findings of this study suggest that greater attention should be paid to the dynamics of shared and vertical leadership structures to better understand their consequences for team processes and outcomes in public settings. Evidence for Practice• Agencies with higher levels of shared leadership performed significantly better due to an increased sense of empowerment among employees. • Public managers enhanced the effects of shared leadership on agency performance by demonstrating transformational leadership. • To harness the potential of shared leadership in the public sector, organizations should introduce managerial training that develops transformational leaders who offer clear vision, motivate, and inspire employees.

When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters-one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.

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Using a sample drawn from a Brazilian electric company exposing employees to both dangerous and non-dangerous working conditions, the current study provides evidence on the differential underlying mechanisms guiding the relationships of organizational identification and person-organization-fit (P-O fit) with job performance. We suggest that despite their relatedness in current literature, organizational identification operates as a largely self-centered process and P-O fit as a predominantly context-dependent one, leading to distinct workrelated processes deriving from each construct. Our findings suggest that P-O fit serves as a pathway through which job identification induces job performance. In this mediating path, personality and in particular neuroticism, hinders the effects of identification, whereas job dangerousness, a contextual factor, undermines work-related effects of perceived environmental congruence (P-O fit). Discussing these results, we provide novel insights on the distinct mechanisms driving organizational identification, P-O fit and their contingencies.