Resilient leadership in the food service sector in Lebanon

¹ Saint-Joseph University of Beirut–Faculty of Business and Management.
² Saint-Joseph University of Beirut–Faculty of Business and Management.
³ Université catholique de Lille, France.

^* Corresponding author: bissan.harbbaghdadi@usj.edu.lb

Abstract

For the past two years, the Lebanese socio-economic crisis has had disastrous effects on the hospitality industry especially the food Service sector. During high adversity and incredibly challenging times, leaders must develop and nurture resilience in the organizations. Resilience may be the attribute that is most needed today by Lebanese leaders since they ought to be more responsive and more attuned to the unprecedented difficult conditions in the country. Based on the Duchek (2020) model of organizational resilience, and the crisis management approach, this qualitative research study focuses on gaining insight and understanding about the managers/owners’ perceptions of events and circumstances affecting their industry, and how they have adjusted to the challenges raised simultaneously by the worst economic crisis in the country and by the spread of Covid-19 around the world. The authors of the study utilized semi-structured interviews to collect and analyze the study data. The findings reveal that pursuing resilience is a process based on the interactions between organizational resilience capabilities and crisis management tasks, and it is mainly characterized by three phases: anticipation of potential threats, coping with disruption and adapting to the new reality.