Saying One Thing, Doing Another: Sensemaking and the Persistence of Leadership Decoupling in High-Risk Indigenous Firms

Abstract

This study examines how organisational members make sense of, and adapt to, the persistent gap between espoused leadership ideals and enacted leadership practice in high-risk, hierarchically structured indigenous firms. Drawing on 33 participants across four focus group discussions and open-ended responses embedded within a survey of 350 employees across eight private oil and gas companies in Nigeria, the study applies the Gioia methodology to a qualitative dataset analysed independently of any quantitative measurement. The analysis surfaces four aggregate dimensions that together form a grounded process model of leadership decoupling: the espoused-enacted gap itself, the cultural mechanisms that legitimate and normalise the gap without triggering organisational crisis, the functional logic that makes the gap locally rational despite its costs, and the behavioural repair mechanism through which the gap narrows or widens depending on the consistency between what leaders say and what they visibly do. The findings show that decoupling in this context is neither individual hypocrisy nor simple leadership failure but a structurally sustained equilibrium, actively reproduced through hierarchy, risk-averse socialisation, and ceremonial communication infrastructure, and only provisionally corrected through visible behavioural consistency at the level of individual leaders. The study contributes to institutional theory and leadership studies by specifying the micro-level mechanisms that keep espoused-enacted gaps stable in high-risk operating environments, and by identifying behavioural role modelling as the primary, though fragile, recoupling lever available to organisations that cannot easily relax the structural conditions producing the gap in the first place.