The Relationship between Resilience and Sustainability in the Organizational Context—A Systematic Review

Abstract

Crises such as the global COVID-19 pandemic and crisis-related factors such as the continued rise in commodity prices continue to have a tremendous impact on organizations. Organizational sustainability, understood as the ability of organizations to survive and thrive in the short and long term, depends on organizational resilience. This study bridges the literature on resilience and sustainability in the organizational context, covering the last 35 years of research, to provide a broader understanding of how organizations, adverse events, and organizational sustainability interrelate. In this paper, we perform a systematic review of the literature from 1985 to 2021, which we supplement with a content analysis, recent empirical findings, and a citation network analysis. We investigate connections between these two fields and identify studies on how the measures of or actions associated with organizational resilience and sustainability can complement or substitute for each other with regard to organizational performance. In addition, we develop an extended framework for categorizing the studies we consider here and the relationships between resilience and sustainability they examine. Our analysis identifies works that bridge the streams of research on organizational resilience and sustainability but also reveals gaps in the literature that open avenues for future research. Overall, most of the ‘bridging’ studies emphasize that the two fundamental concepts are interdependent and regard organizational resilience as a component of organizational sustainability.

Organizational Resilience and the Attention-Based View of the Firm—Empirical Evidence from German SMEs

“…The literature on OR is equivocal. Previous reviews offer different OR definitions and concepts regarding OR frameworks, level of detail, and respective time periods (e.g., [4][5][6]26,31,45,46,[66][67][68][69]. In addition to more recent studies that use an ABV approach in the context of crises and OR (e.g., [22][23][24][25], we have identified parallels in the OR and ABV literature in terms of (1) organizational responsiveness, (2) dynamic capabilities, (3) organizational adaptability and strategic adaptation, and (4) antecedents of OR, such as organizational ambidexterity.…”

“…Prerequisite for OR [59] Managerial attention can negatively impact strategic adaptation [62] Ambidexterity Antecedent of OR [69,70] Particular channel configuration; cognitive flexibility [16,62,68] Resilience in business and management research has split into five research streams, one of which considers OR as an organization's response to external threats [31]. In this regard, an organization's capacity to respond to external threats, i.e., its responsiveness to turbulences or discontinuities such as crises, is mentioned as a key component in several definitions of OR [18,70].…”

From sustainability to resilience: Tracing the transition path for spatial planning policy in Greece

“…The ongoing discourse surrounding sustainability has revolved around the imperative to strike a balance between environmental quality, social equity, and economic prosperity, while the economic, environmental, and social 'pillars' of resilience have been mentioned in the literature on multiple occasions, as the review of Weber (2023) has demonstrated. The same author indicates the significant strides and continued expansion of research on the concept of resilience over the past 35 years.…”

“…Although the two concepts differ substantially in regard to definition and origin, an overall positive trajectory may be observed in the joint examination of sustainability and resilience, indicating that they share comparable objectives and methodologies. However, such research is still in its infancy (Weber, 2023). While many perceive sustainability and resilience as marginally nuanced viewpoints regarding the same phenomenon, many others regard them as separate conceptual paradigms, wherein the conservation objectives of sustainability stand in contrast to the adaptation objectives of resilience (Lew et al, 2016;Roostaie et al, 2019).…”