Leading organizational change: building employee resilience through adaptive leadership

Purpose It is a critical challenge for leaders to encourage employees to cope with uncertainty and lead organizational change in times of volatility. Adaptive leadership enables managers to better cope with organizational change by leveraging followers’ personal resources. This study examines the relationship between adaptive leadership, employee resilience, hope, and change-related uncertainty, drawing on affective events theory and the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Design/methodology/approach We collected responses from 382 Chinese employees via an online survey and analyzed them using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Findings The result shows that adaptive leadership contributes to building hope and employee resilience while reducing change-related uncertainty. Moreover, mediation test results indicate that hope partially mediates the relationship between adaptive leadership and employee resilience. Originality/value Bridging leadership theory and managerial practice, this paper offers insights by explaining how resilience can be built through adaptive leadership with the role of positive/negative emotion triggers, and contributes to actionable practices during organizational change.