Author Identifier
Michael Ajith: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0996-0134
Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Thesis - ECU Access Only
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
School
School of Business and Law
First Supervisor
Tim Bentley
Second Supervisor
Michelle Striepe
Third Supervisor
Andrei Lux
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sustained crisis in Australia’s mining, oil and gas (MOG) industries, consequently disrupting all companies’ operating models. Operational leaders who sit between the top and bottom levels of leadership were compelled to amplify, reconfigure, and extend their roles and responsibilities while recalibrating their behavioural repertoires to maintain continuity, safety, and wellbeing amidst evolving crisis conditions. Despite the scale and duration of this disruption, the literature has offered limited empirical evidence of how the protracted crisis reshaped operational leadership practice within Australia’s resource sector. Moreover, although crises unfold through identifiable phases—initial disruption, peak escalation, and gradual emergence—no prior research has examined how such temporal dynamics influence operational leadership behaviours during a protracted crisis. Therefore, this thesis investigates the impact of the sustained COVID-19 crisis on operational leaders in the MOG sectors, focusing on shifts in work practices, responsibilities, behavioural adaptations, and strategies employed to safeguard employee wellbeing and resilience.
Situated within an interpretative paradigm and informed by key principles of interpretative phenomenology, this study adopts an interpretative qualitative methodology to address the research aims. Semi-structured interviews with 32 operational leaders from Western Australia, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and New South Wales elicited rich accounts of evolving leadership practices, shifting responsibilities, and behavioural adaptations, as well as the strategies employed to sustain personal wellbeing and foster employee resilience throughout the successive phases of the COVID-19 crisis.
The interview results were subjected to thematic analysis to identify frequently occurring themes and sub-themes from the participants’ narratives. The analysis revealed four core themes: (1) adapting to changes and pressures across phrases of crisis; (2) evolving leadership behaviours amid crisis; (3) supporting psychosocial and managing wellbeing; and (4) opportunities for organisational improvement and leadership development. The first and second themes show a dynamic shift in operational leadership practices, responsibilities and behaviours across the crisis timeline, which was a gap in previous studies. The third theme demonstrates that the crisis led to a number of psychosocial risks and that operational leaders played a significant role in promoting wellbeing and enhancing resilience in their employees––evidence that operational leaders are key resources in the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and Conservation of Resources (COR) theory. Finally, the fourth theme demonstrates that despite the negative impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, the pandemic created positive opportunities that can be embedded into Australia’s MOG companies’ business continuity and resilience plans and day-to-day operational activities.
The thesis original contribution lies in the contextualisation, extension and integration of three theoretical framework within the unpredictable and disruptive context of the COVID-19 crisis in Australian resources industry. By integrating ACMT with JD-R, and COR theories to develop a Leadership-Driven Employee Wellbeing and Resilience (L-EWR) model for Crisis, the thesis provides a dynamic, contextually grounded, and wellbeing-oriented understanding of leadership in prolonged crises. L-EWR demonstrates that effective leadership is not only about task completion or relational harmony but also about safeguarding and enhancing employee resources over time. These insights enrich existing leadership frameworks by introducing temporal flexibility, adaptive behaviours, and the centrality of employee wellbeing and resilience in high-risk operational contexts.
The implications of the findings in addition to theoretical extension and contextualisation are far reaching to the practice and organisational design in high-risk companies. The L-EWR framework provides a sound evidence-based mechanism of creating leaders with a capability to provide both operational and psychological support in the occurrence of crisis. The analysis identifies some of the leadership behaviours that promote the welfare and resilience of the employees and can be adopted as a guideline to leadership training, disaster preparedness and wellbeing policy in the MOG industries fields. Broadly, the research is relevant to the area of human-centred crisis leadership and management by demonstrating how operational leadership is a driving force to guarantee and maintain employee resources amid long-term disruption.
Access Note
Access to this thesis is embargoed until 20th December 2030
DOI
10.25958/j7sb-ya36
Recommended Citation
Ajith, M. (2025). Empirical insights into adaptive crisis leadership: Operational leaders’ evolving functions, behavioural reconfigurations, and paradox navigation in Australia’s mining, oil and gas sectors during a protracted crisis. Edith Cowan University. https://doi.org/10.25958/j7sb-ya36