Purpose
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.
Design/methodology/approach
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.
Findings
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.
Originality/value
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.
