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This empirical research draws on the existing theory of transformational leadership, adaptive culture and organizational resilience, and investigates the effect of the elected TQM leadership style “transformational leadership” through the mediating effect of adaptive culture on organizational resilience, that is the key of survival during crises like the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which has severely impacted the business globally.

This study exploited a cross-sectional online questionnaire of a random sample of Dubai service firms, with the unit of analysis being at the firm level. In total, 379 usable responses were received. Regression analysis was conducted to test hypotheses.

The overall findings of this study supported that transformational leadership is positively associated with both adaptive culture and firm's resilience and significantly impacts them. Adaptive culture was found partially mediating the effect of transformational leadership on organizational resilience.

The research findings provide important insights to practitioners (managers and leaders) to better improve their transformational qualities, as these qualities are expected to improve the organizational adaptive cultures and capacity of resilience.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is one of the first studies to examine the transformational leadership effect on organizational adaptive culture and firm's resilience. This investigation expands the boundaries of leadership style theory into new arenas, attempting to partially address the identified knowledge gap in this vein.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how firms can enhance their innovative capabilities and become more resilient. The current business environment requires a specific type of management for companies to remain competitive and innovation plays a key role in this respect. However, this means that a particular kind of corporate culture must promote innovation in the firm. This innovation culture is likely to be present in innovative companies that have survived in the long term (at least 50 years) and be the source of an adaptive advantage.

Using innovative Spanish firms, which were established at least 50 years ago, an exploratory factorial analysis was conducted to verify the existence of an innovation culture. Thereafter, a cluster analysis was undertaken to study differences in performance to be able to detect and identify their adaptive advantage.

The findings offer a detailed profile of old and innovative firms created in Spain. Results show that most of the studied firms (88 per cent) have an innovation culture. Furthermore, two separate groups were identified, in which one showed higher profitability and a lower adjustment to an innovation culture, while the other showed the reverse results. This suggests that innovation culture helps companies be more resilient but does not necessarily lead to higher returns.

Corporate culture is identified as a useful management tool in the search for more resilient enterprises. Specific cultural traits are recommended and a benchmarking tool is applied and made available upon request.

Although there are a number of studies which consider the concept of adaptive advantage and resilience on the one side, and on corporate innovation culture on the other, this paper seems to be the first to empirically explore the relationship of both these concepts.

The purpose of this paper is to examine theoretically and empirically what type of leadership facilitates e-business adoption in large manufacturing firms. The digital transformation of firms requires leadership that can promote the adaptive quality of organizational culture.

The authors conducted an empirical study using two key informants from a sample of 181 incumbent firms.

The authors find significant evidence that adaptive culture is the vehicle by which transformational leaders positively influence e-business adoption.

Given the digital economy’s external pressures, many e-business adoption processes fail due to organizational factors originating in leadership and its capability to change followers’ values, norms, and motivations. To solve this problem, the authors propose a model that explains how transformational leadership first plays a key role in changing characteristics of culture and then facilitates e-business adoption.

The purpose of this paper is to present adaptive culture structuration, a new approach for theorizing and analyzing culture change and for creating an “adaptive cultural structurated learning environment”.

Incorporating a case study in the financial sector the paper explores 12 employees' narrated accounts of living through a culture change initiative. A constructivist, interpretive, qualitative research study followed grounded theory principles. Organizational documentation provided secondary data. Semi structured interview data were analyzed using content analysis, constant comparison and theoretical sensitivity and were managed by ATLAS.ti software.

Three themes emerged: respondents' investment of self, accepting the culture change initiative and its values; employees' epistemic analyses of the embedded value promises including experiencing a critical incident that interrupted managers' enactment of values; employees' resulting “received practice” which represented the enacted (versus the espoused) values and was not visible to managers.

An adaptive culture structurated learning environment fosters a relationship of “negotiated practice” instead of “received practice” between managers and employees in the constitution of corporate culture change. In this space, employee interpretations and assessments, which may otherwise remain hidden from managers and thereby prevent workplace learning opportunities, can be drawn upon, shared meaning co-produced and psychological contract issues explained.

While much has been written on espoused culture change, this is the first theoretical model to examine the process from an employee perspective through an adaptive culture structurated lens.

The purpose of the present study is to examine the direct impact of transformational leadership on non-family employee intrapreneurial behaviour and through a mediating role of corporate adaptive culture and psychological empowerment in family-owned firms.

The study’s sample consisted of 368 key role non-family employees at 109 family export and import firms in the Ho Chi Minh City of Vietnam. The data is analysed using a partial least square–structural equation model (PLS-SEM).

This paper shows that transformational leadership had a positive and significant influence on non-family employee intrapreneurial behaviour directly and via adaptive corporate culture and psychological empowerment as a mediating influence mechanism.

Family-owned firms might balance the need to maintain traditional core values and requires innovation through the development of human capital with non-family employee intrapreneurship.

This paper grants a unique approach to studying intrapreneurial behaviour in the context of the family-owned business.

The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational cultural orientations, as well as the joint effect of transformational leadership and organizational culture on business unit performance.

About 300 employees of a large financial organization in Greece filled in a number of questionnaires measuring organizational culture orientations and transformational leadership. The measurement of business unit performance was obtained by the organization under study.

A path analysis showed that the achievement and adaptive cultural orientations had a direct effect on performance. Moreover, transformational leadership and humanistic orientation had an indirect positive impact on performance via achievement orientation.

A research limitation is that the causal direction of the relations between the predictors and the criteria has been partially established by controlling for the effect of past performance on the perceptions of organizational culture and leadership.

On a practical level the findings suggest that constructive and positive social relations at work need to be accompanied by goal setting and task accomplishment if high organizational performance is to be achieved.

The originality of this study concerns the finding that organizational culture mediates the effect of transformational leadership on business unit performance.

In today's digitalized world, platform leadership is a novel leadership style that facilitates employee innovation. However, the impact mechanism of platform leadership on employee innovation passion has not been explored.

In this study, based on the theory of a self-organizing objective system, 591 new-generation employees were surveyed to explore the impact of platform leadership on the harmonious innovation passion of new-generation employees.

The results showed that platform leadership stimulates the harmonious innovation passion of employees by promoting the integration of organizational and employee objectives. This mechanism was found to be weakened by the internal integrated organizational culture and strengthened by the external adaptive organizational culture.

This study explores the mechanism by which platform leadership style influences the harmonious innovation passion of new-generation employees and provides theoretical guidance and practical insight into ways to improve the innovation capability of new-generation employees.

Resilient higher education institutions can endure, develop and compete in the face of ambiguous, challenging and pandemic situations. In a world of digital transformation, organizational resilience is crucial. Prior research has paid less attention to achieving organizational resilience. This study aims to use the digital capability theory to address this research gap and determine adaptive culture’s direct and indirect influence on organizational resilience. The impact of adaptive culture on organizational resilience is being investigated via the underlying mechanism of digital transformation.

The data was gathered using a cross-sectional, self-administered questionnaire with convenience sampling techniques from higher educational institutions in South Asia’s context. The direct and indirect effects were analyzed using SEM from 294 teaching faculty members.

The findings show a significant positive association between the study’s constructs. The association between adaptive culture and organizational resilience was partially mediated by digital transformation. The findings provide important insights for policymakers, academics and higher education institutions in developing adaptable cultures to achieve organizational resilience, primarily through digital transformation.

Few research studies have investigated a direct relationship among the constructs of the study to the best of the authors’ knowledge. It is the first study to investigate the role of digital transformation as the underlying mechanism between adaptive culture and organizational resilience. Theoretical contributions, practical implications and future research directions have all been presented.

Universities are making changes to fulfill their education, research and community service responsibilities. However, the effectiveness of change initiatives is always in questions because changes especially in developing nations are carried out under multidimensional pressures. Exacerbated by limited experience of systemic change management approaches, most change initiatives fail to address institutional problems. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose adaptive design as a promising approach to create adaptive changes in universities. Guided by pragmatic philosophical viewpoint, this research followed a practice theory to understand actions and decisions related to changes. Staffs and students were made to reflect their perception for the principles and tactics extracted from adaptive design and their implementation in the university. In addition, the study tried to identify major challenges to create adaptive changes. In doing so, the research used mixed method–sequential explanatory approach. Survey and interviews were made to gather relevant data. The finding of this research confirm that adaptive design is an excellent alternative approach to create adaptive changes in universities. This may prove the significance of the approach if accepted and scaled up as an alternative change management theory. However, in the target university, leaders and change agents rarely used a change management approach that resembles adaptive design, which in turn may be the reason for failing to bring adaptive changes (deep and pervasive). Consequently, it was reflected that business as usual do not suffice, and hence, universities have to continually update themselves with up-to-date change management approaches like adaptive design. Besides, it was outlined that institutions should revisit why and how they are introducing changes.

The study followed mixed research–sequential explanatory approach. Multistage stratified random sampling was used to select respondents which included staffs and students. Questionnaire for 219 respondents and in-depth interviews with purposely selected six relevant interviewees were employed. One sample t-test, ANOVA and content analysis techniques were used to analyze data.

The finding of this paper reflected that tenets of adaptive design, its principles and tactics are important tools to lead and institutionalize change initiatives. This may prove the significance of the approach if accepted and scaled up as an alternative change management theory. However, in the target university, leaders and change agents rarely used a change management approach that resembles adaptive design, which, in turn, may be the reason for failing to bring adaptive changes (deep and pervasive) in the institution. Consequently, it was reflected that business as usual does not suffice, and hence, universities have to continually update themselves with up-to-date change management approaches like adaptive design. Besides, it was outlined that institutions should revisit why and how they are introducing changes.

The basic limitation of this study is the problem of supporting literature evidence from other similar research findings, since the authors hardly find similar research outputs. Besides, this research might probably have a problem of transferability to other organizations, because the samples of this study were too limited given the huge number of staffs, which may not represent the whole population besides the interview was made only with volunteers. Moreover, it was conducted only in universities. For this reason, care must be taken to deduce any of the results to other population.

The research reflected that the university has to work to build change adaptive culture. In doing so, developing deep investigation and open discussions of challenges are necessary to understand adaptive problems. Besides, the university has to try to use adaptive design as an alternative change management tool, collaborative thinking for creative solutions, using group change strategies, and creating clear communication systems on the types and impacts of changes (meaning making), as well as acquainting staffs with the necessary skills to do adaptive works are among the practical implications forwarded as recommendations.

This research has reflected on the change management approaches of higher education institutions. The social value of universities are determined by their contribution as a result of efforts made to upgrade themselves via various reform initiatives. To enhance the reform/change process, universities are investing huge resources to adopt and implement innovative approaches. However, the change efforts need to be guided by a systemic approach and by introducing adaptive design might contribute a lot for universities to enhance their social contribution. Lessons from adaptive design have implications to overcome challenges associated with human elements like resistance, collaboration, owning and implementing changes, etc.

This research is originally conducted extracting valuable lessons from adaptive design introduced by Bernstein and Linsky (2016). This investigation has tried to study adaptive design in one of the universities in a developing nation with a major purpose of supporting or refuting the approach. This study tried to capture staffs’ perception for adaptive design approach. Besides, an attempt was made to find out systems that resemble adaptive design in the university’s change management process. Moreover, the common challenges to create adaptive changes were traced. Studying the case in the university and common challenges helped to recommend the need of adaptive design confidently.

The purpose of this research study is to investigate the application of the resource‐based view to a construct of organizational culture, doing so in the context of the generic models of business strategy.

The original research underlying this paper was an empirical study of 311 organizational sub‐units, comprising over 2,600 individual respondents. The measures consisted of two data collection instruments: a valid and reliable survey instrument (the Organizational Culture Inventory; OCI), and an Executive Manager Interview form designed for this research project.

Although the author has all of the research results in terms of statistical results, for the practitioner readership of this journal, the results are restated the results in conceptual, not statistical, terms. The findings included that adaptive, flexible (technically “constructive” cultures) appear to be positively related to desirable outcomes (including quality of the firm's products and services), regardless of the type of strategy deployed.

The results suggest that to become a high‐performance organization, key members need to understand their business strategy and create an adaptive, flexible, constructive culture that will facilitate the implementation of the business strategy.

This research fills a void in the area of empirical studies testing the linkage between business strategy and organizational culture.