Commanding Performance, Cultivating Resilience: The Bifurcated Influence of Leadership in High-Risk Indigenous Firms

Abstract

This study investigates how and under what conditions leadership styles generate organisational resilience and performance in indigenous oil and gas firms, theorising organisational culture as the mediating mechanism and psychological safety climate as the boundary condition that determines whether leadership's cultural influence is genuinely embedded or symbolically enacted. A convergent mixed-methods design integrated PLS-SEM analysis of 350 survey responses across 12 Nigerian indigenous oil and gas firms with thematic analysis of four focus group discussions involving 33 purposively selected participants. Moderated mediation was examined at three conditional levels of psychological safety climate using bias-corrected bootstrapping. Leadership styles directly predict organisational performance but not resilience. Organisational culture fully mediates the leadership–resilience relationship and partially mediates the leadership–performance relationship, revealing an asymmetric mediation structure. Psychological safety climate significantly moderates both culture-mediated pathways, with stronger indirect effects observed under high safety conditions. Leaders in high-risk, hierarchically structured environments must recognise that compliance-oriented management sustains short-term performance while simultaneously undermining the adaptive cultural conditions resilience demands. Psychological safety is an operational priority, not a cultural aspiration. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no prior study has applied a moderated mediation framework to explore the conditional, culture-mediated pathways linking leadership styles to firm-level resilience and performance in the oil and gas sector, making this the first such investigation in Nigeria's indigenous operator context.