Leadership research often treats disruption as a bounded episode: a shock occurs, leaders respond, and effectiveness is evaluated through recovery or performance. Persistent external disruption complicates that logic because ambiguity, stakeholder expectations, organizational vulnerabilities, and the credibility of prior leadership claims can change while response is still unfolding. This article develops a non-empirical dynamic model of leadership effectiveness under persistent disruption by integrating evidence on crisis leadership, sensegiving, trust, organizational resilience, and stakeholder legitimacy. The model treats leadership effectiveness as a temporally contingent capacity to revise interpretations and responses while sustaining credible relationships with internal and external audiences. Sensegiving is positioned as iterative rather than declarative; trust is conceptualized as requiring recalibration as evidence and expectations change; resilience and legitimacy are treated as distinct, non-substitutable pathways of effectiveness. The model further distinguishes adaptive trajectories, in which interpretation, communication, and response are progressively realigned, from maladaptive trajectories, in which overconfidence, delayed revision, communication breakdown, or legitimacy erosion compound disruption. The contribution is a multilevel architecture that connects leader behavior, follower interpretation, organizational adaptation, and stakeholder evaluation without collapsing them into a single outcome or claiming a universal causal sequence. The model generates propositions and boundary conditions for longitudinal, multilevel, network, and comparative testing. Its principal limitation is that supporting evidence comes from heterogeneous crisis, change, resilience, and stakeholder settings; consequently, the integrated relationships proposed here require direct empirical validation across disruption types, institutional contexts, and temporal horizons.
