Crisis Leadership as a Forger of Employees' Resilience Ambidexterity: A Stress Inoculation Perspective

ABSTRACT

Interest in organisational resilience and crisis management has grown rapidly in recent years, yet how organisational leadership fosters employees' resilience ambidexterity (RA) during unprecedented organisational disruption remains poorly understood. Drawing on Stress inoculation theory (SIT), we propose and test a model in which crisis leadership (CL) builds two individual‐level resources, adversarial growth orientation (AGO, a cognitive reappraisal resource) and psychological hardiness (a dispositional resource), which together explain how CL relates to employees' RA. We further theorise that organisational crisis preparedness climate (OCPC) moderates this CL‐to‐RA resource chain, such that the chain is more effective when OCPC is high. In doing so, this study extends prior organisational‐ and team‐level resilience research to the individual level, clarifying both the cognitive and dispositional mechanisms through which CL builds dual (absorptive‐adaptive) resilience capacity and the organisational conditions under which this process is strongest. Results based on a multi‐source, time‐lagged dataset from 441 employees and senior crisis managers in high‐risk industries support the model: CL has a significant indirect effect on both absorptive and adaptive RA, operating serially through AGO and then psychological hardiness. These indirect effects are significantly stronger when OCPC is high. The study contributes theoretically by specifying the psychological process linking CL to dual resilience, and practically by showing organisations how to combine leadership development with crisis‐preparedness investment to build a resilient, ambidextrous workforce.