Adaptive leadership over time: activation, adaptation and service commitment in health care.

PURPOSE: This study aims to address the unresolved temporal puzzle in health-care leadership research by examining why adaptive leadership reliably activates early engagement yet fails to sustain or reverses its effects under prolonged exposure.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Using a three-wave longitudinal design (n = 451) across public health-care organisations, the study applies random intercept cross-lagged panel modelling to disentangle within-person dynamics from stable between-person differences. Time-ordered mediation and moderation pathways linking adaptive leadership, job resources, job demands, work engagement, workload intensity and commitment to service quality are estimated.

FINDINGS: Adaptive leadership recalibrates across temporal phases, functioning as a phase-sensitive activation process an activation-oriented trigger that produces early gains in job resources and engagement. Over time, the same leadership behaviours generate cumulative job demands that erode engagement and suppress downstream service commitment. These effects exhibit pronounced lag asymmetries and non-monotonic trajectories, with workload intensity accelerating the shift from benefit-driven to cost-driven mechanisms.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The study reconceptualises adaptive leadership effectiveness as temporally phase-dependent, identifying the temporal mis-fit between persistent activation-oriented behavioural repertoires and evolving consolidation demands as the proximate mechanism of declining effectiveness; extends job demands-resources theory into a longitudinal leadership process model; and establishes non-monotonic leadership effects as a systematic property of sustained health-care work systems rather than a boundary anomaly.