Crisis Leadership, Organizational Sensemaking, and Organizational Resilience: The Moderating Effect of Environmental Turbulence

In an era of increasing environmental turbulence, organizational resilience has become a critical factor for surviving and recovering from crises. Although prior research has extensively explored the antecedents of organizational resilience, the mechanisms through which crisis leadership enhances organizational resilience, particularly through cognitive pathways and under varying levels of environmental turbulence, remain underexplored. Grounded in sensemaking theory, this study examines the mediating role of organizational sensemaking and the moderating effect of environmental turbulence in the relationship between crisis leadership and organizational resilience. Using multi-wave survey data from 482 Chinese enterprises, we empirically test the proposed hypotheses. The results indicate that: (1) crisis leadership has a significantly positive effect on organizational resilience; (2) organizational sensemaking partially mediates this relationship; and (3) environmental turbulence moderates both the direct effect of crisis leadership and its indirect effect (via organizational sensemaking) on organizational resilience. These findings advance theoretical understanding of the cognitive and contingency mechanisms that link crisis leadership to organizational resilience, while offering practical guidance for leaders to adapt their sensemaking strategies according to environmental turbulence levels. We acknowledge that the generalizability of the findings may be limited by the single-country (China) sampling frame.