Organizational values in support of leadership styles fostering organizational resilience: a process perspective

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe how resilience unfolded in a project-based organization with the support of organizational values through changing leadership styles. The rapidly announced restrictions on businesses during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) provided an opportunity to observe and study resilience unfold.Design/methodology/approachThe process-perspective case study approach of a structural and civil engineering design firm in San Francisco, California, USA, integrates interviews, observations, document analysis and information tracking via email and Microsoft Teams. The researchers adopted a leadership perspective, where the units of analysis are the internal management and the employees' behaviors.FindingsIn the case examined, the capability represented in the organizational values influenced the choice of situation-appropriate leadership styles to support employees. The values of relationship, passion and trust influenced the dominant choice of a transformational style, where stability and excellence facilitate a transactional style – all equally important for the balance and resilience of the project-based organization.Originality/valueThis study demonstrated that when organizational values support leaders in cultivating a learning environment, those values provide stability for leaders to promote resilience. To the best of the researchers' knowledge, no previous work described how situational-, transformational- and transactional-leadership styles evolve in response to a crisis and together facilitate organizational resilience.