Strategic Leadership, Organizational Resilience, and Post-Crisis Recovery: A Longitudinal Study of Nigerian Firms

This dissertation develops and tests a longitudinal model linking strategic leadership characteristics to organizational resilience and post-crisis recovery trajectories in Nigerian firms. The multi-crisis Nigerian business environment, encompassing macroeconomic instability, regulatory disruptions, security challenges, and the COVID-19 shock, provides a theoretically compelling natural laboratory for resilience research. Strategic leadership theory, organizational resilience theory, and crisis management literature provide the theoretical foundation. The research employs a longitudinal mixed methods design. A quantitative panel analysis tracked forty Nigerian firms from diverse sectors and geopolitical zones across crisis and recovery periods between 2018 and 2024. Organizational resilience was measured through revenue trajectory, market share recovery, and organizational adaptation indices. Qualitative in-depth interviews with chief executives and board chairs of twenty firms provided interpretive depth. Findings indicate that strategic leaders demonstrating high adaptive cognitive flexibility, stakeholder trust investment before crises, and strategic resource slack management achieve significantly superior resilience and recovery outcomes. The study develops the Crisis-Ready Leadership Framework as an original theoretical contribution, specifying the pre-crisis, crisis, and post-crisis leadership competency configurations associated with optimal organizational resilience. The research fills a critical gap in the resilience literature by providing empirically grounded, context-specific leadership-resilience theory for an African emerging market. Keywords: strategic leadership, organizational resilience, post-crisis recovery, Nigeria, longitudinal study.