Unlocking Project Team Resilience: Relational Governance as Antecedent Through Reflexivity and Affective Identification

Drawing on the conservation of resources (COR) theory and the cognitive-affective process system (CAPS) framework, this study investigates how relational governance boosts project team resilience through a dual-path mediation mechanism. Employing hierarchical multiple regression and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, empirical results reveal that team reflexivity and team affective identification fully mediate the relationship between relational governance and project team resilience, with a significant serial mediation effect flowing sequentially from team reflexivity to team affective identification. Furthermore, project complexity emerges as a boundary condition, enhancing the mediating role of team reflexivity while exerting no significant moderating effect on the affective identification pathway. A series of additional robustness checks was conducted for each method within the mixed-methods design, further reinforcing the overall rigor and reliability of the results. These findings advance the theoretical understanding of how resilience develops, unfolds, and is shaped in project teams, affording novel insights to the body of knowledge in engineering project management. In terms of practical application, this study highlights the need for project managers to prioritize relational governance strategies to foster project team resilience through cultivating reflective practices and shared affective bonds, while calibrating these strategies according to the contextual complexities of project-based engineering environments.