To explore leadership competencies related to crisis management, we
identified a sample from the Institute for Crisis Management database by
examining 7 years (2000-2006) of business crisis data. Each year, this
institute identifies and categorizes major business crises compiled electronically from a database of more than 1,500 international business publications, including syndicated newspapers, business and financial wire
services, national and regional business newspapers and magazines, and
industry trade publications and newsletters. The news stories are screened
by a proprietary crisis search logic program, and articles that qualify as crisis news are downloaded to a database. For the time period of our study,
there were 59 cases. From the database, we identified a sample of 20 business crises for an in-depth qualitative analysis. The 20 cases selected were
a purposive sample that represented different crisis types in the 7-year time
period. It was our goal that a stratified sample based on crisis type would
help to organize cases and facilitate comparisons by setting boundaries to
examine leadership competencies