Organizational resilience: a capability-based conceptualization

Abstract

In highly volatile and uncertain times, organizations need to develop a resilience capacity which enables them to cope effectively with unexpected events, bounce back from crises, and even foster future success. Although academic interest in organizational resilience has steadily grown in recent years, there is little consensus about what resilience actually means and how it is composed. More knowledge is particularly needed about organizational capabilities that constitute resilience, as well as conditions for their development. This paper aims to make a contribution to this heterogeneous research field by deepening the understanding of the complex and embedded construct of organizational resilience. We conceptualize resilience as a meta-capability and decompose the construct into its individual parts. Inspired by process-based studies, we suggest three successive resilience stages (anticipation, coping, and adaptation) and give an overview of underlying capabilities that together form organizational resilience. Based on this outline, we discuss relationships and interactions of the different resilience stages as well as main antecedents and drivers. We formulate propositions that can act as a foundation for future empirical work.

Organizational change and everyday health system resilience: Lessons from Cape Town, South Africa

“…These responses are, moreover, enabled by iii) the health system's cognitive, behavioral and contextual resilience capacities, which together support it to notice, and be decisive in developing creative responses to, disruptions ( Lengnick-Hall et al, 2011 ; insert link to online file A ). Cognitive and behavioral capacities support each other in collective problem-solving and generating a store of possible actions to draw on when responding to stress, together enabling: understanding of environmental developments; making appropriate decisions; and taking necessary action ( Duchek, 2020 ). Contextual capacities, meanwhile, provide the organizational setting in which cognitive and behavioral capacities are enacted and integrated ( Williams et al, 2017 ).…”

“…This paper adds to health system resilience literature by reporting a study that purposefully and prospectively tested the EHSR framework, as is needed to understand the mechanisms that foster organizational resilience ( Duchek, 2020 ). The paper examines how health managers and staff in one local health system within the City of Cape Town (South Africa) responded to parallel, centrally-imposed processes of organizational change and primary health care (PHC) service improvement.…”

Corporate Social Responsibility and Organizational Resilience to COVID-19 Crisis: An Empirical Study of Chinese Firms

“…The systematic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic and the later recovery in China make the country an appropriate context for research on organizational resilience which is defined as a system's latent ability to endure adversity as well as to recover after a shock [10]. To survive unexpected events, organizations need to develop a resilience capacity which enables them to (a) cope effectively with unexpected events (need to be tested in a post-shock environment where firms are recessing) and (b) bounce back from crises [11] (need to be tested in a post-shock environment where firms begin to recover). The former captures the stability dimension of resilience, which is an organization's ability to resist adverse circumstances, indicating that systematic shocks have no severe consequences as they fall within the boundaries of a firm's coping range.…”

Expanding entrepreneurial solution spaces in times of crisis: Business model experimentation amongst packaged food and beverage ventures

“…Both the social media analysis and founder interviews showcased an abundance of new business model experiments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic amongst Finnish packaged food and beverage ventures. These experiments led to both crisis management by maintaining operational viability through searching for alternative revenue streams, but also further enhanced the resiliency of the ventures through expanding the solution space ( Williams et al., 2017 ; Herbane, 2019 ; Duchek, 2020 ). As the value and originality of new ideas are difficult to predict before-the-fact ( Berg, 2016 ; Fuchs et al., 2019 ), taking action creates new knowledge, skills and resources that can then be leveraged to discontinue, modify or scale subsequent efforts to pursue opportunities.…”