Organizational crises expose a persistent conceptual and practical problem: systems may preserve operations while exhausting the people whose effort sustains that continuity. Resilience research has often emphasized survival, recovery, adaptation, or renewal, whereas employee well-being research has examined distress, depletion, withdrawal, and unequal exposure through partly separate theoretical traditions. This integrative review connects those domains and examines how organizational adaptive capacity, crisis-leadership behaviors, employee well-being, and structural responsibility for crisis strain interact across work systems. The review combines conceptual, quantitative, qualitative, longitudinal, multilevel, and methodological evidence through a transparent, PRISMA-compatible selection and synthesis process. The synthesis indicates that adaptive capacity is phase dependent and level specific; leadership effects depend on threat conditions, identity processes, task interdependence, autonomy, and support; and operational continuity cannot be assumed to indicate healthy employee adaptation. Evidence also suggests that staffing, work design, employment security, digital arrangements, and resource allocation shape who absorbs crisis demands and who receives protection. At the same time, findings remain constrained by pandemic concentration, cross-sectional designs, uneven multilevel measurement, and frequent separation of organizational and human outcomes. The article contributes an original crisis-resilience framework that treats continuity and human cost as connected but non-equivalent outcomes. It offers bounded governance implications and identifies the longitudinal, multilevel, comparative, and mixed-method evidence required to test, refine, or reject the proposed synthesis. The framework is conceptual, not a validated causal model or universal prescription.
