Purpose This paper aims to address a persistent conceptual puzzle in organisational resilience scholarship by examining why transformational leadership, despite strong theoretical alignment with adaptability and change, frequently fails to directly enhance organisational resilience in complex, bureaucratic and resource-constrained contexts, particularly within public and knowledge-intensive organisations. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts an integrative, theory-building literature review design, synthesising open-access research from strategic human resource management, leadership and organisational resilience literatures. By critically reinterpreting conceptual, review and selected empirical studies, the review develops a system-level explanation rather than testing causal relationships. Findings The review demonstrates that transformational leadership primarily shapes vision, meaning and strategic intent but lacks the operational mechanisms required to institutionalise adaptive capacity. Human resource architecture, comprising aligned human resource systems, practices, workforce capabilities and governance frameworks emerges as the missing link that translates leadership intent into routinised behaviours and collective resilience capabilities. Practical implications The findings suggest that sustainable organisational resilience depends less on leadership development alone and more on coherent human resource architectures that embed adaptability into everyday organisational practice. Originality/value By positioning human resource architecture as the central explanatory mechanism, this paper shifts resilience scholarship from leader-centric to system-centric and capability-based frameworks.
Rathnayake et al. (Tue,) studied this question.