Outsiders at the Helm: When Institutional Outsiderness Helps or Hurts Public Leaders’ Crisis Management Performance

Institutional outsiders have become increasingly common in public administrations, coinciding with a growing prevalence of public crises. Yet we know little about whether and under what conditions leaders with limited political experience perform well or poorly during such crises. Drawing on strategic leadership and institutional change research, we develop competing hypotheses and a contingency framework that explains how public leaders’ institutional outsiderness shapes their crisis management performance. We argue that outsiderness can either hinder or facilitate crisis response, depending on conditions that affect leaders’ ability to effectively enact institutional change. Specifically, institutional outsiderness is more likely to hinder crisis management when leaders (i) operate in highly institutionalized environments, (ii) lack relevant crisis management experience, and (iii) hold low precrisis social approval. Using data on U.S. state governors during the COVID-19 pandemic (Study 1), we find that governors’ institutional outsiderness is associated with lower crisis management performance, especially under these conditions. However, when institutionalization is low, outsiderness is associated with higher crisis management performance. We conducted a second study with a different sample and crisis context (U.S. state governors during the 2008 financial crisis) and partially replicate the results from Study 1. Together, our results suggest that whether institutional outsiderness is a liability or an asset for crisis management depends on contextual and leader-level conditions. These findings contribute to research on crisis leadership, strategic leadership, and public administration.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/2024.18656.