Thriving, Not Just Surviving in Changing Times: How Sustainability, Agility and Digitalization Intertwine with Organizational Resilience

Abstract

Nowadays, the buzzwords for organizations to be prepared for the competitive environment’s challenges are sustainability, digitalization, resilience and agility. However, despite the fact that these concepts have come into common use at the level of both scholars and practitioners, the nature of the relation between sustainability and resilience has not yet been sufficiently clarified. Above all, there is still no evidence of what factors determine greater resilience to change in an organization that also wants to be more sustainable, especially in times of crisis and discontinuity. This research aims to explore from a theoretical point of view, through the construction of a conceptual model, how these dimensions interact to help the business to become strategically resilient by leveraging digitization and agility as enablers. A new view of resilience arises from the study, which goes beyond the well-known ability to absorb or adapt to adversity, to also include a strategic attribute that could help companies capture change-related opportunities to design new ways of doing business under stress. A key set of strategically agile processes, enabled by digitalization, creates strategic resilience that also includes a proactive, opportunity-focused attitude in the face of change. Strategic resilience to lead to organizational sustainability must be understood as a multi-domain concept quite similar to the holistic view of sustainability: environment, economy and society. Finally, the research offers a set of propositions and a theoretical framework that can be empirically validated.

Crisis Preparedness of Healthcare Manufacturing Firms during the COVID-19 Outbreak: Digitalization and Servitization

“…Previous management studies have viewed resilience from two different perspectives, i.e., the static and the dynamic viewpoints [23]. In the static viewpoint, resilience represents a firm's ability to recover from disruptions and is limited to the phase of coping with adverse events [11]. In contrast, the dynamic view of resilience has a broader focus and views resilience as the ability to cope with threats and opportunities in external environments.…”

“…First, from the OIPT, digitalization enhances the information processing capability of a company and helps them to reduce environmental uncertainty. The implementation of digitalization increases a firm's ability to collect information, and also their ability to process information [11,54]. For example, the implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT) helps firms to gather all types of information, such as that relating to customer needs and product operation conditions, to help firms anticipate the occurrence of internal and external disruptions [43].…”

“…Digitalization refers to the use of digital technologies to innovate a business model and to provide new revenue streams and value-producing opportunities in industrial ecosystems [9]. The adoption of digital technologies improves the information processing capability of firms and enables the efficient use of resources [10,11]. From this perspective, servitization and digitalization provide benefits for recovering from adversities.…”

Transformational Leadership’s Risks and Shortages When a Company Faces the External Crisis

“…The organizational resilience is impacted by the strategy. The resilience, when facing a crisis, refers to a kind of ability that a company can bounce back from the crisis [5], and in the macro-economy, resilient economies are the ones that can emerge best from the crisis, or that resilience is the necessary condition to get restarted [10]. When a slump in demand occurred during the epidemic period, Virgin Australia is more vulnerable than its competitors and the company had insufficient methods to solve the problems, which made them failed to stop loss effectively.…”

Organizational Agility in Industry 4.0: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Moreover, it is noticed that the agility of organizations can enhance the resilience of the organization, which is defined as the ability of the organization to bounce back from crises due to any internal and external or environmental changes [16]. It is pointed out that as agility is going to be impacted due to the adoption of Industry 4.0, organizational resilience can also be a result of the enhanced agility [17]. Furthermore, it can be noted that the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies can be a result of the motivation of organizations to develop resilience.…”