Abstract: “Expert or not” is a controversial issue in the selection of leading officials at the moment. To explore the influence of the leadership characteristics of the Municipal Health Commission on the efficiency of epidemic prevention in the period of regular epidemic control actions, a Generalized Linear regression model was established to empirically test the 269 prefectures with COVID-19 outbreaks from November 11 to December 7, 2022. The study finds that current leading officials face the reality of “layman” leadership “deviation” to a certain extent, but leaders both with and without prominent “expert” characteristics need to enhance their comprehensive capacity for coping with specific situations and learn to master expertise in their competent fields to become expert leaders, “scholar leaders” or “specialized managers.” At the same time, the study finds that under the current political system, the expert characteristics and performance characteristics of team members can compensate the limited capacity of the “chief leaders” of making rational decisions to a certain extent, so there is no need to overemphasize the importance of the expert characteristics and performance characteristics of the “chief leaders.”

Key words: leadership characteristic, expert leadership, organizational performance