The current Covid-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges of global level. Leaders of organisations and nations need to quickly decide and implement ameliorative measures to prevent further increase in the pandemic and return to normalcy as fast as possible. These leaders may need to adopt particular styles for effective decision making and implementation. This paper reviews the leadership styles adopted by organisational and political leaders in addressing the challenges presented by Covid-19 pandemic. A search of the first five pages of Google Scholar yielded 31 papers for the review. These papers had been described and discussed. Notably, the most accepted transformational style for organisational performance, found only two papers dealing with it in the pandemic situation. It may only mean that the researchers did not consider these styles in their works, rather than being unsuitable to the situation. There were approximately as many leadership styles as there were papers. More papers dealt with context-based adaptive styles by different national leaders and the leadership characteristics required to deal with such crisis situations. How China managed to return to normalcy in Wuhan was dealt by two papers. One paper compared three leaders of three different styles and how they achieve effectiveness. Specific bad example of Brazilian president and authoritative structure of Turkish presidentship were also dealt by two papers from those countries. The review leads to the conclusion that context-specific changing styles need to be adopted by organisational and national leaders to achieve best results in this pandemic situation.

Keywords: Leadership style, pandemic, Covid-19, review