Converging demands, diverging experiences: gendered leadership in the Australian mining, oil and gas sector during a prolonged crisis

Crises expose and intensify the gendered dynamics of organisations (Ahern and Loh, 2021; Eichenauer et al., 2022; Kulich et al., 2021). In such contexts, leaders face expanded responsibilities, rapid change and heightened demands (Ajith et al., 2025; Bajaba et al., 2021). Although this study is situated in the prolonged COVID-19 crisis, similar dynamics may arise during other prolonged disruptions, including economic, environmental and operational crises (Wu et al., 2021). Leadership in these contexts is, therefore, an evolving lived experience shaped by sensemaking, emotional labour and legitimacy work.

Crisis leadership research has expanded, yet the field continues to privilege observable behaviours, organisational outcomes and acute response phases (Bajaba et al., 2021; Flotman, 2021; Wu et al., 2021). Less is known about what leaders do, feel and sustain during prolonged crisis conditions, particularly in high-risk, male-dominated industries. Recent gender and crisis research highlights the persistence of masculine leadership norms and calls for more contextual and interpretive accounts of crisis leadership (Martin-Sanchez et al., 2026; Newstead and Wilson, 2026). The Australian resources sector provides an especially relevant context because its operating conditions are shaped by physical hazards, remote work, production pressures and masculinised organisational cultures, all of which can intensify legitimacy pressures and leadership strain during crisis (Ajith et al., 2025; Ajith et al., 2026).

Gender and management scholarship shows that leadership is socially constructed through gendered norms, expectations and power relations (Acker, 1990; Fletcher, 2004; Ridgeway, 2001). Leadership legitimacy is, therefore, produced through relational work, identity work and organisational expectations. Women leaders are often associated with care and relationality, particularly in crisis contexts where communal expectations can become salient (Aldrich and Lotito, 2020; Bruckmüller and Branscombe, 2010; Post et al., 2019). In contrast, men leaders are often associated with decisiveness, risk-taking and emotional control (Haddon et al., 2015; Sheaffer et al., 2011). During crisis, these expectations may become more visible and consequential (Eichenauer et al., 2022). Existing studies have largely examined these dynamics through behaviour and performance, while less is known about how leaders experience and negotiate gendered expectations during prolonged disruption (Ajith et al., 2025; Ajith et al., 2026; Wu et al., 2021).

Gendered leadership research also cautions against essentialist claims that women are inherently more effective leaders during crises (Kulich et al., 2021; Windsor et al., 2020). Such claims can obscure the emotional costs of care-oriented leadership and the structural conditions that make care work unevenly distributed (Knights, 2021; Ryan and Haslam, 2007). Recent Gender in Management scholarship similarly frames leadership as relational, contextual and identity-based, with legitimacy negotiated through emotional work, identity presentation, boundary management and organisational expectations (Amaro and Scheepers, 2022; Lewis and Benschop, 2022; Mashele and Alagidede, 2022). These perspectives suggest that crisis leadership should be understood through leaders’ sensemaking of conflicting demands within gendered organisational settings (Lux et al., 2024; Striepe and Cunningham, 2021).

We build on this literature by exploring how middle-level leaders in the Australian resources sector experienced a prolonged crisis. Specifically, our study examines how shared structural pressures were interpreted through gendered meaning-making, emotional labour, boundary management and identity work. In doing so, this study develops a contextual account of gendered crisis leadership in a male-dominated, operationally intensive industry.

Crises intensify demands for rapid decision-making, cognitive effort, moral responsibility and uncertainty (Adigwe et al., 2024; Yulianti et al., 2022). Crisis scholarship has long shown that crises create convergent structural stressors, including demands for speed, coordination and accountability (Bundy et al., 2017; Shen et al., 2025). Pearson and Clair (1998) further highlight the cognitive and moral dimensions of crisis management, including the interpretive work required when familiar assumptions no longer hold. Despite these insights, limited attention has been given to how leaders make sense of prolonged crises as lived and embodied experiences.

COVID-19 research shows that crisis leadership is contextually specific, incremental and shaped by evolving organisational conditions (Högberg, 2022; Karimi and Khawaja, 2025; Striepe and Cunningham, 2021). Prolonged crises require ongoing sensemaking, relational coordination and emotional labour, especially as uncertainty persists (Ajith et al., 2025; Bajaba et al., 2021). This aligns with calls to situate crisis leadership within identity work and affective labour, extending analysis beyond observable behaviours and short-term responses (Eagly, 1997; Gipson et al., 2017; Haslam et al., 2021; Hoyt and Burnette, 2013).

Middle-level leaders occupy an intermediary position between executive leadership and operational teams (Weyer, 2007). This position becomes more complex during prolonged crises because middle-level leaders are often responsible for translating strategic decisions, sustaining operational continuity and buffering employees from organisational disruption (Ajith et al., 2025; Eagly, 2018). Their experiences are, therefore, central to understanding how crisis leadership is enacted and endured over time.

The psychosocial pressures facing middle-level leaders during crisis include safety concerns, relational demands and continuous coordination across organisational levels (Baker et al., 2025; Triana et al., 2023). Ecological and multilevel perspectives further suggest that crisis leadership is shaped by culture, relationships, team dynamics and organisational support systems (Lux et al., 2024). These conditions can create significant strain for leaders’ well-being, identity work and boundary management during prolonged crisis (Triana et al., 2023; Weyer, 2007).

Gender scholarship shows that organisational systems are shaped by masculine values, including control, autonomy, decisiveness and emotional containment (Acker, 1990; Badura et al., 2018). Hegemonic masculinity further explains how these values become normalised in male-dominated settings, influencing which forms of leadership appear legitimate and authoritative (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Kark and Buengeler, 2024). These perspectives challenge assumptions of neutral leadership by showing how organisational structures reproduce gendered expectations.

Social role theory explains how women and men are associated with different behavioural expectations, creating tensions when leadership norms privilege agentic or masculine-coded behaviour (Eagly et al., 2012; Eagly and Wood, 2012). Crisis conditions can sharpen these tensions by increasing demands for authority, decisiveness and emotional regulation (Kantorowicz-Reznichenko et al., 2025; Kulich et al., 2021). Studies of crisis emotions also show that gender can shape how leaders experience, regulate and express affect under pressure (Eichenauer et al., 2022; Shen et al., 2025). Crisis may, therefore, reinforce gendered expectations that influence how leadership authority, competence and legitimacy are interpreted (Badura et al., 2018; Lux et al., 2024; Triana et al., 2023).

A key tension exists between crisis leadership scholarship and gender scholarship. Crisis leadership research often emphasises convergence by focusing on common structural demands during periods of uncertainty, urgency and heightened accountability (Bundy et al., 2017). Gendered leadership research emphasises divergence by showing how gendered expectations, legitimacy pressures and organisational norms shape how leadership is experienced and enacted (Acker, 1990; Eagly and Wood, 2012). This creates an important theoretical tension: leaders may face similar operational pressures during crisis, yet interpret and internalise those pressures differently through gendered meaning-making, emotional labour, boundary management and identity work.

Our study adopts a convergence–divergence approach (Figure 1) that integrates crisis leadership theory, gendered organisation theory, social role theory and hegemonic masculinity. The framework suggests that prolonged crises create converging structural pressures, including uncertainty, accountability, coordination demands and sustained operational pressure (Pearson and Clair, 1998; Shen et al., 2025). Gendered organisational norms shape how these pressures are felt, enacted and emotionally managed (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005; Eagly and Karau, 2002). Even under similar structural conditions, leaders may follow different experiential pathways in managing legitimacy, emotional labour, boundaries and endurance.

Although gender and crisis leadership have received increasing scholarly attention, limited research has examined how middle-level leaders experience prolonged crises in high-risk, male-dominated industries such as mining, oil and gas. Previous research has often focused on leadership effectiveness, behavioural comparisons and representation (Ajith et al., 2025), with less attention to lived experiences of legitimacy, emotional strain, boundary management and prolonged crisis endurance (Ryan and Haslam, 2007; Ryan et al., 2011). We, therefore, explore Australian resources sector middle-level leaders’ experiences and interpretations of leadership during the COVID-19 crisis. This study offers a contextual and experiential account of gendered crisis leadership in an operationally intensive industry.

We used comparative interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to examine how women and men leaders made sense of emotionally complex crisis experiences (Smith and Fieldsend, 2021). IPA is well suited to research that seeks to understand lived experience, identity-relevant interpretation and meaning-making under conditions of complexity (Pietkiewicz and Smith, 2014). Leadership during the COVID-19 crisis involved heightened responsibility, uncertainty and identity-relevant sensemaking (Ahern and Loh, 2021). The comparative design enabled systematic attention to convergence and divergence across women’s and men’s accounts while preserving the idiographic depth central to IPA.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with 32 middle-level leaders, including general managers and managers, across Australian resources sector organisations. Participants were recruited through purposive sampling to ensure they had direct responsibility for teams during COVID-19 (Palinkas et al., 2015). Recruitment continued until the interviews no longer generated substantively new insights relevant to the research aim, consistent with information-oriented qualitative sampling (Palinkas et al., 2015).

Our study adopted a sequential analytic design. The full data set (n = 32) was first analysed thematically to provide a broad, contextualised account of leadership experiences across the sample. This first stage mapped the shared structural pressures of crisis leadership and helped identify information-rich cases for more detailed interpretative analysis. A purposive subsample of 15 participants was then selected for IPA to enable idiographic depth. This sequential approach aligns with qualitative studies that combine broader thematic mapping with more intensive IPA, where thematic analysis establishes contextual breadth and IPA is used to examine meaning-making in purposively selected cases (Larkin et al., 2019; Spiers and Riley, 2019).

The IPA subsample was not intended to be statistically representative; rather, it was purposively selected to enable idiographic and phenomenological depth, consistent with IPA principles (Smith et al., 2021). Here, “richness” refers to detailed, reflective and experientially grounded narratives, akin to Geertz’s (2008) “thick description”, that support close interpretative analysis. Selection was based on the depth and reflexivity of participants’ accounts (Smith and Osborn, 2015), alongside variation across mining, oil and gas roles and contexts, to capture nuanced patterns and support transferability.

The sample comprised 26 men and 6 women, reflecting the male-dominated leadership composition of the resources sector. With respect to leadership position, 24 participants were managers and 8 were general managers. Most participants were from mining (n = 29), with a smaller number from oil and gas (n = 3). Geographically, most participants were based in Western Australia (n = 22), while the remaining participants were based in other Australian states (n = 10). In terms of work context, 18 participants were site-based and 14 were in corporate or hybrid roles, reflecting the operationally distributed nature of the sector.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews conducted between mid-June 2023 and mid-August 2023 (Busetto et al., 2020). Interviews lasted approximately 45–60 min and were conducted by the lead author. The interview questions focused on leaders’ responsibilities, challenges and lived experiences during the COVID-19 crisis. Participants were encouraged to reflect on how leadership felt and evolved over time, including the emotional, relational and identity-related dimensions of their experience. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed for analysis.

To meet the research aim, we first conducted thematic analysis of all 32 semi-structured interviews (Braun and Clarke, 2006). This stage provided a broad map of leadership work, challenges and responses to the COVID-19 crisis across the full sample. Analysis involved familiarisation, coding, theme development and theme refinement. Both inductive codes derived from the data and deductive codes informed by crisis leadership literature were applied. The shared structural conditions identified in this phase included heightened responsibility, uncertainty and psychosocial risk. This first stage was partly preparatory for the IPA because it established the broader contextual patterning of the data set and informed the purposive selection of information-rich cases. The interpretive claims reported in the comparative IPA are grounded in the idiographic analysis of the 15 selected cases, with the full data set providing contextual breadth.

In Stage 2, a purposive subsample of 15 participants, comprising 4 women and 11 men, was analysed using IPA (Pietkiewicz and Smith, 2014; Smith and Fieldsend, 2021). Selection prioritised the depth and reflexivity of participants’ accounts rather than numerical balance between gender groups. The resulting composition retained representation from both women and men while more closely reflecting the male predominance of the full data set and industry context. Transcripts were analysed case-by-case using NVivo 12. The analysis involved close reading, exploratory noting and the development of themes based on meaning-making, emotional tone, language and metaphor. Patterns were then examined within and across gender groups to identify similarities and differences in how participants interpreted and experienced crisis leadership. Gender was used as an interpretive lens rather than a causal variable. The process was iterative and supported by an audit trail and reflexive dialogue, which helped challenge assumptions and avoid essentialising gender differences.

To support rigour and trustworthiness, we used several strategies (Guba, 1981; Shenton, 2004). Deep idiographic engagement was supported through repeated and close interaction with the selected IPA cases. Analytic transparency was enhanced through systematic coding documentation and the maintenance of an audit trail. Verbatim participant quotations were used to support credibility and to demonstrate the connection between interpretation and participants’ accounts. Reflexivity was maintained throughout the analysis to help mitigate researcher bias and challenge assumptions about gendered patterns.

Ethical clearance was secured from the Edith Cowan University Human Research Ethics Committee (approval # 2023–04264-AJITH) before data collection. Purposively sampled participants were contacted via email and through professional networks. All participants received an information sheet outlining the study purpose, voluntary participation, the right to withdraw without consequence and confidentiality and privacy protections. Written informed consent was obtained before each interview. Pseudonyms and anonymisation were used to protect participant confidentiality. Audio recordings and transcripts were stored securely on password-protected computers, and access was restricted to members of the research team.

Although participants described similar structural pressures, they interpreted responsibility, risk, authority and identity in different ways. The patterns reported below should not be read as fixed gendered traits or as evidence of causal gender effects. Rather, they are interpreted as contextually shaped patterns within a male-dominated, high-risk industry, with notable variation within both women’s and men’s accounts.

The first superordinate theme concerned how participants experienced leadership risk during the crisis. Several women participants described leadership risk in relational and emotional terms. Their accounts emphasised how decisions affected relationships, morale, trust and individual well-being. For these participants, risk was experienced as the possibility of letting people down emotionally, even when decisions were operationally justified:

Several men participants described leadership risk in operational and systems terms. Their accounts centred on continuity, safety, equipment and the consequences of system failure. These participants recognised emotional consequences, yet these consequences were often framed through the broader risk of operational breakdown or adverse events occurring under their responsibility:

The second superordinate theme concerned how participants experienced authority and power during the crisis. Several women participants described authority as something that required ongoing negotiation. Their accounts suggested that leadership power could not be taken for granted, particularly when crisis conditions were unstable. Authority was experienced as contingent on visibility, responsiveness and relational credibility:

These accounts suggest that several women participants worked actively to sustain legitimacy during the crisis. Several men participants described authority as more structurally granted, yet personally burdensome. Their concern centred less on establishing authority and more on maintaining authority under pressure, particularly when decisiveness or control could be called into question:

The third superordinate theme was concerned with how participants experienced boundary management during the COVID-19 crisis. For several women participants, leadership boundaries were highly permeable. Some described conflict between personal and professional life, particularly when responding to distressed employees. These participants explained that it was difficult to disengage emotionally, even after working hours:

These excerpts illustrate how, for some women participants, crisis leadership became closely tied to personal identity and relational responsibility. In contrast, some men participants described boundary management as stricter and more compartmentalised. They reported maintaining boundaries through emotional suppression and role separation, even as workloads escalated:

Several men also acknowledged that this compartmentalisation required sustained vigilance and contributed to internal pressure:

The fourth superordinate theme concerned experiences of isolation in leadership. Several women participants described isolation primarily in social and relational terms, both in relation to their own experience and in relation to their concern for team members. Although participants reported frequent interaction with their teams, through Microsoft Teams or in-person contact, they still described loneliness in carrying leadership responsibility, particularly when peer support was limited. Isolation was experienced as having few safe spaces to express uncertainty or fatigue:

In contrast, some men participants described isolation as emotional solitude, often framed as the absence of space to express uncertainty or vulnerability. These participants described being surrounded by people while still feeling unable to disclose doubt or fatigue:

For these participants, isolation was experienced internally and was shaped by norms discouraging emotional disclosure:

This theme describes how participants interpreted learning during the crisis. Several women participants framed learning as reflective and identity-forming. Their accounts emphasised learning about people, emotional processes and personal boundaries. Crisis learning was, therefore, described as skill acquisition intertwined with a reconsideration of leadership identity and relational responsibility:

Some men participants conceptualised learning in more pragmatic and instrumental terms, focusing on systems, routines, information management and rapid adjustment to changing requirements:

Personal insight was also present in men’s accounts, but it was less frequently foregrounded as the main form of crisis learning:

A final point of divergence concerned how participants imagined leaving, staying or rethinking leadership. Several women participants described moments of quiet withdrawal, reduced aspiration or reassessment of career direction during the crisis. These reflections were framed as responses to sustained emotional exhaustion and the cumulative demands of care-oriented leadership:

In contrast, several men participants described endurance as a taken-for-granted responsibility. Rather than explicitly considering exit, they described continuing forward because stepping back did not feel legitimate or available within the expectations of the role:

This endurance was accompanied by physical fatigue, emotional suppression and limited opportunities for recovery.

The superordinate themes indicate that gendered organisational expectations shaped participants’ experiences of risk, authority, boundaries, isolation, learning and imagined exit. Several women participants described leadership as relationally exposed, emotionally permeable and closely tied to ongoing legitimacy work. Several men participants described leadership as more control-oriented, emotionally contained and endurance-based. These patterns should be understood as interpretive tendencies rather than statistically generalisable gender differences. Importantly, both pathways produced cumulative leadership strain. In the Australian resources sector, the COVID-19 crisis made operational continuity paramount and often pushed leadership well-being into the background. The findings therefore highlight the psychological costs of gendered leadership expectations during prolonged crisis conditions (Table 1).

We examined how middle-level leaders in the Australian resources sector experienced leadership during the prolonged COVID-19 crisis. Our study focused on how shared structural demands produced both convergent and divergent gendered experiences. Drawing on crisis leadership theory and gender theory, we conceptualise leadership as embodied meaning-making mediated by interpretation, identity work and organisational norms. The findings support a convergence–divergence model, while also showing that these patterns reflect contextual responses rather than fixed gender differences. Participants’ experiences were shaped by prolonged crisis conditions and by the gendered norms of a male-dominated industry context.

The findings show that prolonged crises intensified leadership pressure by heightening responsibility, uncertainty and continual exposure to risk. This pattern is consistent with crisis leadership research showing that crises increase urgency, coordination demands and accountability (Ajith et al., 2025; Ajith et al., 2026; Bundy et al., 2017; O’Reilly et al., 2015; Striepe and Kafa, 2025). For middle-level leaders, these pressures were experienced through the need to maintain operations, interpret shifting requirements and support teams under prolonged uncertainty.

Our contribution is in distinguishing convergence at the level of structural conditions from convergence at the level of lived experience. Participants faced similar crisis demands, yet these demands were interpreted and managed in varied ways. This challenges the assumption that shared crisis pressures produce homogeneous leadership experiences. The findings instead support a more interpretive account of crisis leadership, one that attends to sensemaking, affective labour and situated experience under disruption (Gipson et al., 2017; Lux et al., 2024). Structural convergence, therefore, does not necessarily produce experiential convergence.

Gendered organisation theory and social role theory help explain the observed divergences. Acker’s (1990) account of gendered organisations shows how organisational structures carry assumptions about how leaders should behave, providing a framework for understanding how crisis demands may be interpreted through gendered expectations. Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) concept of hegemonic masculinity is also relevant in male-dominated sectors, where norms of control, endurance and emotional restraint shape responses to pressure. This interpretation is consistent with recent work on masculine leadership norms (Kark and Buengeler, 2024).

Several women participants described heightened attentiveness to relational and psychosocial risk during the crisis. This aligns with social role theory, which links women with communal and relational expectations (Eagly and Wood, 2012). We extend this perspective by showing how such expectations may be internalised into leaders’ sensemaking, shaping the forms of responsibility that are felt and enacted over time (Eagly and Karau, 2002). These findings also align with role congruity and leadership evaluation research, which shows that women leaders may face heightened scrutiny when competence is judged against masculine leadership norms (Eagly et al., 1992; Hoyt and Burnette, 2013; Triana et al., 2023).

Several men participants prioritised system-level risk and affective control, consistent with hegemonic masculinity expectations. These norms required ongoing self-control and emotional regulation, suggesting that masculine leadership authority must be continually performed under pressure (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Authority, therefore, appeared as relationally and continually accomplished, requiring ongoing recognition, enactment and maintenance (Badura et al., 2018; Eagly and Karau, 2002).

The findings suggest that crisis leadership is shaped by gendered norms that influence leaders’ interpretive frames and the work required to maintain authority. This supports gender and leadership scholarship that cautions against universalising claims and emphasises the importance of context, task demands and audience expectations (Gipson et al., 2017; Kark and Buengeler, 2024). Table 2 summarises points of convergence and divergence in women’s and men’s leadership experiences during the COVID-19 crisis.

Authority during prolonged crisis was neither simply possessed nor uniformly enacted. Several women participants described legitimacy as contingent on presence, relational credibility and continued responsiveness. Role congruity theory helps explain why authority may require more active negotiation when communal expectations intersect with masculine-coded leadership norms (Eagly and Karau, 2002; Hoyt and Burnette, 2013). Several men participants, by contrast, described authority as more structurally assumed, but maintained through decisiveness, control and visible emotional steadiness. In both pathways, authority had to be sustained under pressure.

Emotional labour formed part of this ongoing accomplishment. For several women participants, attentiveness to others’ emotional needs extended relational responsibility beyond formal role boundaries, increasing the burden of care (Vial and Cowgill, 2022). For several men participants, hegemonic masculinity norms constrained vulnerability and help-seeking, encouraging emotional restraint even as strain accumulated (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). The form differed, but none of the pathway was costless.

Boundary management translated these expectations into distinct endurance strategies. Several women participants described porous boundaries through which care, worry and relational responsibility entered personal time and restricted recovery. This pattern reflects Acker’s (1990) account of organisational structures that embed expectations of care and accessibility, particularly when prolonged disruption intensifies psychosocial vigilance (Lux et al., 2024; Shen et al., 2025). Several men participants described compartmentalisation as a means of preserving operational control. Yet emotional containment could also internalise strain and postpone recovery, making cumulative stress less visible (Gooty et al., 2025).

These findings connect legitimacy work, emotional labour and boundary management within a single account of crisis endurance. Masculine authority was neither a stable resource nor was relational competence a naturally feminine capacity. Both were contextually performed and sustained within a male-dominated organisational setting (Kark and Buengeler, 2024; Mano-Negrin and Sheaffer, 2004). The convergence–divergence model, therefore, explains how shared crisis pressures can generate different routes to authority and endurance while exposing leaders across those routes to psychological cost.

Learning emerged as an identity-relevant process rather than a uniform response to crisis. Several women participants described reflective learning centred on personal limits, relational sensitivity and the kind of leader they sought to become. Several men participants more often foregrounded instrumental learning, including shorter planning horizons, information accuracy and rapid operational adjustment. These were contextual tendencies rather than mutually exclusive categories; reflective and instrumental learning appeared within both groups.

Read through sensemaking theory, these accounts show how crisis learning involved interpreting experience and revising leadership identity, rather than simply acquiring new techniques (Maitlis and Sonenshein, 2010; Weick, 1995). The more instrumental accounts also resonate with research showing how masculine identities can be sustained through self-reliance and control, particularly in male-dominated settings (Aléx et al., 2008). Crisis learning was, therefore, shaped by which forms of leadership were recognised, supported and made available within the organisational context.

This interpretation extends discussions of leadership development by showing how prolonged disruption can reshape identity across successive stages of a crisis (Ciuk and Schedlitzki, 2022). Table 3 positions these findings in relation to prior gender–leadership research. It summarises how this study confirms, extends and qualifies existing scholarship while identifying the psychological and identity-related costs associated with prolonged crisis leadership.

We contribute to gender and crisis leadership literature by examining how prolonged crises are experienced within a high-risk, male-dominated industry where operational continuity, remote work arrangements and masculine organisational norms intensify leadership pressures. Rather than claiming that the observed patterns are entirely new, we show how established role congruity and gendered organisation dynamics are lived, negotiated and sustained by middle-level leaders during prolonged crisis conditions (Acker, 1990; Eagly and Karau, 2002). Our study shifts the research focus from observable crisis leadership behaviours to lived experiences of emotion, identity work, legitimacy work and meaning-making under continuing disruption (Gipson et al., 2017; Maitlis and Sonenshein, 2010). It also illustrates how similar structural pressures can reinforce gendered organisational expectations over time. The proposed convergence–divergence model offers a contextual framework for explaining how shared crisis demands can generate parallel but differentiated leadership experiences shaped by organisational context and gendered workplace norms.

Several limitations affect the interpretation of the findings. The IPA subsample comprised 11 men and 4 women, while the full interview data set comprised 26 men and 6 women. Both samples were, therefore, predominantly male, reflecting the leadership composition of the sector but limiting the breadth and symmetry of gender comparison. The full data set was also concentrated in mining, with smaller representation from oil and gas, and included participants across managerial levels and site-based, corporate and hybrid roles. The gendered patterns identified through the comparative IPA are, therefore, exploratory and contextually situated. They should not be interpreted as definitive evidence of systematic differences between women and men leaders, but as interpretive tendencies within this sample and its specific organisational and industry context.

Gender did not operate independently of organisational position. Participants’ experiences were also shaped by managerial level, proximity to site operations and whether their responsibilities were primarily operational, support-oriented, corporate or hybrid. The patterns may, therefore, reflect the intersection of gendered expectations with role authority, work location and functional responsibility. We treat gender as one organising lens within this wider configuration rather than as a singular explanation. Longitudinal and multilevel research across crisis contexts should examine these intersections directly, using larger and more diverse samples to explore within-group variation and intersectionality in male-dominated industries.

Practically, organisations should avoid assuming uniform leadership experiences during prolonged crisis conditions. Leadership development and crisis management structures should recognise different forms of emotional strain, including emotional suppression, isolation, sustained legitimacy pressure and relational overload. Psychosocial support, reflective leadership development, peer-support mechanisms and emotionally sustainable leadership practices should be incorporated into crisis preparedness and leadership development initiatives. Related research in health care similarly shows how supportive work environments and communities can generate positive resource gains that advance women’s leadership and careers (Farivar et al., 2026).

The findings also emphasise the need for organisational cultures that allow leaders to express their own need for emotional support. In high-risk and operationally intensive sectors, leaders are often expected to be persevering, decisive and emotionally controlled. Sustained emotional suppression and legitimacy pressure can accumulate over time and contribute to psychological strain. Psychologically safe leadership cultures can be supported through senior leaders modelling openness, structured debriefing, peer-support systems, recognition of relational competence and confidential access to psychological support.

At a broader societal level, this study challenges simplified narratives of crisis leadership that position effective leadership as inherently masculine, emotionally detached or uniformly experienced. The findings show that leadership experiences during crisis are shaped by organisational structures, emotional expectations and gendered workplace norms. More inclusive and emotionally sustainable leadership approaches may, therefore, support leader well-being, leadership retention and healthier organisational cultures during prolonged disruption.

This study examined the lived, interpretive and endurance dimensions of crisis leadership among middle-level leaders in the Australian resources sector. Leaders faced convergent structural demands, including heightened responsibility, uncertainty and sustained strain, yet they interpreted and managed these demands through gendered meaning-making, emotional regulation, boundary management and identity work. By integrating crisis leadership and gender theory, this study supports a convergence–divergence model showing how shared crisis conditions can produce differentiated experiential pathways. The findings recast leadership during prolonged crisis as an embodied and gendered practice shaped by prolonged disruption. In doing so, this study offers a contextual understanding of how leadership can remain sustainable, legitimate and psychologically supported during prolonged crisis conditions.

Dr Michael Mayom Ajith is a Specialist Mine Design Engineer at Rio Tinto and a Researcher at Edith Cowan University. His research focuses on occupational health, leadership in high-risk industries and psychosocial risk management. He has published on mining-related injuries and organisational behaviour in leading journals within the resource sector.

Andrei Alexander Lux is a Lecturer and Research Cluster Lead at Edith Cowan University. His research explores authentic leadership, organisational behaviour and cross-cultural cognition, with a focus on positive follower outcomes. He is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Management & Organisation and an award-winning leadership scholar and educator.

Dr Michelle Striepe is a Senior Lecturer in Educational Leadership at Edith Cowan University. Her research focuses on leadership in challenging contexts, teacher leadership and social influences on school leadership. She has published widely on crisis leadership, academic integrity and visual methodologies, contributing to several international research collaborations.

Professor Tim Bentley is Director of the Centre for Work + Well-being at Edith Cowan University. His research focuses on psychosocial risks, workplace well-being and the future of work. He has published extensively and previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Management & Organisation.

The authors gratefully acknowledge Edith Cowan University (ECU), the Australian Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarships, the Minerals Research Institute of Western Australia (MRIWA) and Australian resources industry companies for their invaluable contributions to this study.

During the preparation of this work, the author(s) used “Grammarly AI” to improve the readability and language of the manuscript. After using this tool/service, the first author reviewed and edited the content as needed and takes full responsibility for the content of the published article.