Agile Leadership and Digital Transformation for Crisis Resilience and Sustainable Practices During Macro-Crises: A Dual-Theoretical Perspective in Ghana’s Tourism Sector

Drawing on Chaos Theory and Dynamic Capabilities Theory as a complementary theoretical lens, this study explores how agile leaders themselves describe the relationship between their leadership practices and digital transformation in pursuit of crisis resilience and sustainable practices during macro-crises within Ghana’s tourism and hospitality sector. Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 43 purposively sampled sector stakeholders with direct experience of applying agile leadership during crisis, analysed via NVivo 15. Because participants were selected for this experience, the findings describe perceptions within this sample rather than causal effects relative to non-adopters. Participants described navigating unpredictable, non-linear environments in ways they associated with both short-term operational survival and longer-term socio-economic sustainability. While participants reported that digital adoption was substantially impeded by infrastructural deficits, financial constraints, and cultural resistance, they described responding to these barriers by cultivating collaborative ecosystems and pursuing scalable capacity-building initiatives. Participants also associated their use of digital tools with reduced operational waste and workforce empowerment, rather than efficiency gains alone. This research proposes a conceptual framework suggesting that technological integration may be more effective when accompanied by leadership agility, offering a starting point for building crisis-resilient, digitally inclusive tourism ecosystems in Ghana that future comparative research can test.