Hurricane Harvey Leadership Analysis

In the face of calamity, the cry for leadership rings more a screech. As the rain came pouring down over coastal Texas at the end of last month, mother nature surely produced the most ideal conditions for a leadership situation. Hurricane Harvey, the wettest tropical storm to hit the contiguous United States, inundated cities like Houston and Beaumont and put Texas Governor Greg Abbott in a rather sink or swim locus to lead through difficult circumstances (Alvarez). This essay will examine the exchange of Governor Abbott’s leadership style with the effected Texan residents through analyzing numerous New York Times articles and placing the governor on Hersey and Blanchard’s Leadership II model. To begin, the National Hurricane Center saw that Harvey was quickly approaching hurricane status the morning of Thursday, August 24, gaining power quickly as it continued through the Gulf of Mexico (Alvarez). Within the following two days, tropical storm Harvey matured into the strongest hurricane to hit the United States in the past decade, colliding into the Texan Gulf Coast and flooding the fourth most populous city with on average forty inches of rainfall (Alvarez). Early on Harvey’s timeline, many Texan residents, watching the storms development, shrugged the storm’s prowess off; the media simply was blowing the storm’s force out of proportion …show more content…
Characterizing his actions throughout the disaster, Abbott could be considered an S1 leader, as he shows higher directive without much of any supportive behavior (Northouse 95). Abbott told the citizens of Houston to evacuate town, explicitly directing them to accomplish some goal. Further, the governor was not expecting to deal with issues surrounding undocumented immigrants, however when the matter was brought to his attention, it was swiftly