Introduction

Introduction

Introduction

Like four million other U.S. nurses, Cassandra Alexander was ill-prepared for the COVID19 pandemic when legions of infected people slammed her San Francisco Bay area hospital in March 2020. The shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) spurred the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that health care workers craft inferior homemade masks from materials such as bandanas and scarves (Hashimoto 2020). As her hospital became overrun with patients, Alexander was so emotionally overwhelmed that she became suicidal, was diagnosed with PTSD, and resigned from the hospital. “This job is fucking hard, and most of us do it without complaint,” she recalled, “but it was already baseline stressful, pre-covid, and we were all already burnt” (Alexander 2021, 9). Most telling was Alexander’s response to nurses being labeled “heroes” by the public in various media platforms. To her, the term “hero” rang hollow and cruel, prompting her to describe the pandemic as the time when “America pretended healthcare workers were heroes and then made us feel disposable” (5).

In this article, we examine the use, and possible misuse, of the hero label in describing frontline workers who risk their lives to help others during times of major societal crisis. We frame the phenomenon of identifying heroes during crisis as a commodity in an exchange relationship between heroic leaders and beneficiaries of heroic leadership. Our Dynamic Negotiated Exchange (DNE) model of heroism and heroic leadership conceptualizes the exchange relationship as a dynamic process that evolves over time as a result of social processes that give rise to formal and informal negotiations between both parties in the exchange. The terms of the negotiation are first manifest in dialogue on social media platforms and then translate to individual or structural reforms offering more equitable exchange outcomes. We illustrate our DNE model by drawing from notable examples of phenomena consistent with dynamic and negotiated social exchange between heroes and recipients during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2022.

This article presents a brief overview of four different literatures that we incorporate into our DNE model of heroic leadership. These four scholarly areas are (a) conceptualizations of heroism and heroic leadership; (b) exchange theories of heroism and heroic leadership; (c) models of negotiation; and (d) theories of responses to emergency situations. The goals of this article are to propose a conceptual framework integrating these four disparate literatures and to apply the framework to notable social events and responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. We outline several testable empirical hypotheses that derive from our framework and suggest potential avenues for further conceptual development and future applications.

This article begins with a brief overview of definitions of heroism and heroic leadership, followed by a review of the exchange model approach toward understanding the relationship between heroic leaders and recipients of heroic action. We then show how this exchange was strained and revealed to be deficient as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.

Introduction

Table of Contents