Adaptive Leadership: The New Driver of a Firm's Transfiguration and Sustainability in the Constantly Changing Manufacturing Business Landscape

ABSTRACT: Businesses are increasingly pondering how to deal with the increasingly more disruptive modern business ecosystem changes. As some businesses become lucky or even apply the appropriate strategies to thrive in the constantly evolving business terrain, others often fail. Even as some businesses fail, it is often transformational leadership style and not adaptive leadership that most businesses explore as part of the strategies for responding to the constantly evolving era of artificial intelligence and machine learning. For that reason, this study used an integrative review to highlight how adaptive leadership can be used as one of the drivers of a firm’s transfiguration and evolution in the constantly changing manufacturing business landscape. Through such analysis, the integrative review aimed to discern the major limitations of adaptive leadership as well as the mitigating adaptive leadership strategies that the contemporary businesses can use. If faced with evolving market threats, findings indicated most high-performing businesses to often use a combination of adaptive leadership strategies encompassing acquisitions of emerging new capabilities, new value innovation or investment in new technologies. In addition to strategic alliances, business behaviours also indicated use of branding and market positioning as well as constant diagnosis and response to market trends’ changes. But even if that is so, adaptive leadership was still found to be affected by organisational rigidity, employee resistance and stringent cost-savings approaches that affect investment of adequate financial resources in adaptive leadership changes. These imply that as businesses strive to evolve and adapt with the changing market and industry trends, these are some of the traps that they need to avoid.