Organizational values in support of leadership styles fostering organizational resilience: a process perspective
International Journal of Managing Projects in Business
ISSN: 1753-8378
Article publication date: 15 February 2023
Issue publication date: 14 March 2023
Abstract
Purpose
The 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/approach
The 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.
Findings
In 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/value
This 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.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the staff at the KPFF SFO for opening doors for this study and giving time for interviews and informal conversations about the staff's experience with managing the COVID-19 crisis.
The first author also expresses sincere gratitude to “Norges tekniske høgskoles fond” and “Forsknings-og undervisningsfondet i Trondheim” for the scholarships funding her 6-month research exchange with UC Berkeley during the academic year 2019/2020.
This study was supported in part by members of the Project Production Systems Laboratory (P2SL) at UC Berkeley. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the members of P2SL, KPFF staff or the funding agencies.
Citation
Tvedt, I.M., Tommelein, I.D., Klakegg, O.J. and Wong, J.-M. (2023), "Organizational values in support of leadership styles fostering organizational resilience: a process perspective", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 16 No. 2, pp. 258-278. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-05-2022-0121
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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