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The purpose of this paper is to describe how resilience unfolded in a project-based organization with the support of organizational values through changing leadership styles. The rapidly announced restrictions on businesses during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) provided an opportunity to observe and study resilience unfold.

The process-perspective case study approach of a structural and civil engineering design firm in San Francisco, California, USA, integrates interviews, observations, document analysis and information tracking via email and Microsoft Teams. The researchers adopted a leadership perspective, where the units of analysis are the internal management and the employees' behaviors.

In the case examined, the capability represented in the organizational values influenced the choice of situation-appropriate leadership styles to support employees. The values of relationship, passion and trust influenced the dominant choice of a transformational style, where stability and excellence facilitate a transactional style – all equally important for the balance and resilience of the project-based organization.

This study demonstrated that when organizational values support leaders in cultivating a learning environment, those values provide stability for leaders to promote resilience. To the best of the researchers' knowledge, no previous work described how situational-, transformational- and transactional-leadership styles evolve in response to a crisis and together facilitate organizational resilience.

This paper aims to highlight the need to place focus on ensuring soft factors in construction projects’ design management and to discuss whether soft factors are hidden success factors.

The presented data is a result of findings from two master theses. The approach is qualitative research and consists of nine semi-structured interviews with design managers and two case studies involving document analyses, meeting observations and descriptions of seven interviews.

This empirical study demonstrates that soft factors are considered important for design managers’ achievement of a successful design process. Focus on soft factors promotes good communication and will improve team performances. Factors are hidden because they are invisible and immeasurable. Furthermore, soft factors are not defined as assigned tasks and are, therefore, easily neglected. Designers are hesitant to explore the possibilities of new technology owing to the fear that they will forfeit human interaction.

This paper is limited to the presentation of empirical findings. Therefore, theory is not a basis for the study but rather a framework for the discussion.

The results in this paper broaden the understanding of human behaviour during the design phase. This knowledge should be considered when the project’s delivery model is designed as it will safeguard actor concerns during the ongoing technological transformation.

This paper contributes knowledge of the view regarding soft factors among project actors. It expands the traditional understanding of value by adding soft factors to the traditional success measures of time, quality and cost.