Navigating ambiguity: context sensitivity as a foundation for resilient academic leadership

Amid overlapping crises and accelerating change, academic leaders are increasingly expected to sustain organizational functioning while responding to uncertain and shifting demands placed on higher education institutions. Thus, there is a need to better understand the relationships between leadership practices and organizational resilience in academia. This qualitative study explored the experiences of academic middle managers in Czech public universities across two interview waves conducted over a five-year period (N1 = 31, N2 = 26) to examine how leadership practices can both strengthen and weaken unit-level resilience depending on the organizational context, available resources, and the nature of the crisis or demand. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we identified three themes that make visible the ambivalent and context-sensitive nature of academic leadership: (1) demonstrating personal commitment as a source of both effective crisis management as well as of leader exhaustion, (2) fostering group belonging as a source of both unit cohesion and conflict, and (3) divergent leadership practices in crisis management as oscillating between collective support and directive decision-making. The findings contribute to scholarship on leadership and resilience in higher education by conceptualizing resilience as a process of adaptive balance that requires academic leaders to calibrate engagement, identity, and authority in relation to changing contextual demands. Implications for leadership development include supporting sustainable engagement, fostering transparent within-group and intergroup communication, and strengthening institutional systems that enable context-sensitive crisis responses.