Transformational leadership, dual innovation, and organizational resilience

How to cope with environmental changes and grow in a crisis is a real issue that organizations must face. Resilience helps companies turn crisis into opportunity and leverage opportunities in the face of adversity. Despite the increasing importance of organizational resilience in practice, little research has been conducted on how leadership affects organizational resilience. In this study, we constructed a research framework of “transformational leadership-dual innovation-organizational resilience” to explore the “black box” of leadership’s role in organizational resilience. Based on the empirical analysis of 385 enterprise survey data, the study finds that transformational leadership can help organizations adapt to adversity, form early warnings, get out of adversity, and even achieve faster and better development from the four aspects of intellectual stimulation, personality care, vision motivation, and team building. The exploratory and exploitative innovation behaviors brought by transformational leadership, as well as the balance and complementarities between them, provide a path to achieve organizational resilience enhancement. In addition, the study also found that resource redundancy in organizations can not only positively regulate the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational resilience, but also positively regulate the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational early warning capacity, adaptive capacity, and recovery and growth capacity.