Leadership and burnout in an unexpected crisis: an autoethnography set within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic in Singapore.

Abstract

Leadership theories and practices guide my work as a CEO. My interest used to lie in engagement. I surmise that engagement is the positive facet of an organisation, and burnout is its negative. Then, I become the leader who experience burnout during the Covid-19 pandemic. This presents a learning opportunity - for my doctorate and my life. It leads me to autoethnography: using my identity as a CEO (leadership), my experience (burnout), to interpret a social phenomenon (Covid-19). There is a lack of literature on the specific construct of leadership-burnout, and interviews yield little on personal leadership-burnout. I wonder: is burnout a topic that leaders can’t say or don't want to say? This then leads me to the issues of vulnerability and authenticity in leadership. Autoethnography accords me the emotionality to talk about personal issues with vulnerability, and authenticity. As I collect, analyse, and interpret autoethnographic data from five categories: personal memory (or archival) data, self-observational data, self-reflective data, self-analytical data, and external data (from interview conversations and interactions) to understand the cause and effect of my leadership-burnout, I begin to see my “self” for what it is, and who I am. Can I self-critique my leadership style and authenticity? Am I willing to self-censure my controlling behaviours and habits? Can I self-examine my trust management, information-sharing and relational patterns? Am I able to self-reveal my vulnerability against the conventional leader image of no-vulnerability? And, do I self-doubt or self-affirm my leadership ability and capacity in a crisis? In focusing on the “self”, autoethnography uses reflexivity to identify the crossjunctions between self and the occurring reality, observe the patterns in my thoughts and behaviours as I respond to said reality, and nurture a more empathetic identity to emerge from the reflexive process. Through my autoethnographic journey that documents my experiences and reflections of leadership-burnout, I find that a lot more could be discovered and shared about the topic. For future considerations, I would like to inspire more leaders, and lead conversations on leadership-burnout. I will stop short of suggesting how to reverse or prevent burnout. Because I still don't know how to. I am not that kind of doctor. But by concluding with how I reset, recover, and rejuvenate myself after the pandemic, from remedies I learnt and developed, I hope to join the scholars and practitioners who have written about leadership-burnout during and since the pandemic, to help shift the popular (negative) consensus of leadership-burnout, such that we can nod towards future leadership behaviours that are kinder, and destigmatise leadership-burnout in the process. We can achieve this by getting more leaders to boldly show up as examples of the condition.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Tracey DICKSON (Supervisor) & Raechel JOHNS (Supervisor)