Abstract
Across contemporary organisations, crisis is increasingly experienced not as an episodic disruption but as a persistent condition of work. In the UK mid-market fashion industry, firms occupy a structurally squeezed position between low-cost mass retailers and luxury brands. They face price competition from ultra-fast fashion while simultaneously confronting growing expectations around sustainability, brand authenticity, and ethical production typically associated with higher-end segments. This dual pressure generates continuous strategic repositioning, operational restructuring, and performance demands, producing environments in which instability becomes normalised rather than exceptional. Under such conditions, employees are not simply responding to isolated challenges but operating within sustained turbulence, giving rise to cumulative organisational exhaustion that may be understood as crisis fatigue. While leadership scholarship has extensively examined how organisations respond to crisis events, it remains largely oriented toward disruption followed by recovery. Less attention has been paid to how leadership operates when turbulence is continuous and employees’ adaptive resources are progressively depleted. Addressing this gap, this developmental paper introduces the emerging concept of Crisis Fatigue Leadership, referring to leadership practices oriented toward sustaining organisational coherence, legitimacy, and meaning in contexts where crisis conditions persist. The paper proposes an exploratory qualitative multi-case study design focusing on UK mid-market fashion organisations. By examining how leaders interpret ongoing instability and respond to employee fatigue, the study seeks to develop a conceptual framework for understanding leadership in environments of prolonged turbulence. The contribution aims to extend crisis leadership scholarship beyond episodic response models and to open discussion on how leadership theory might evolve in the context of continuous organisational strain.