Organizational Resilience

Conceptual Overview

A glance at any newspaper provides examples of organizations that are vulnerable to unanticipated, disorderly, and high-impact environmental shocks that instantly disrupt operating routines and performance expectations and threaten their survival. Events as diverse as a fire in the clean room of a key supplier, terrorist attacks, natural disasters such as hurricanes, or disruptive human failure can instantly and powerfully challenge a firm's accepted routines. Resilient organizations are able to thrive despite these challenges.

There are two perspectives on what organizational resilience means. Some see it primarily as the ability to rebound from unexpected, stressful adverse situations. This view is similar to the definition of resilience in the physical sciences, in which a material is resilient if it is able to regain its original shape and characteristics after being stretched or pounded. When organizational resilience is seen as bouncing back, the emphasis is generally on coping strategies and a quick ability to resume expected performance. Attention is on establishing a strong fit between the organization and a new reality and avoiding or limiting behaviors that are dysfunctional or regressive. Rebound-oriented organizational resilience is closely linked to hardiness and to adaptive fit.

Others see organizational resilience as substantially more than recovery. From this perspective, organizational resilience includes not just restoration but also the development of new capabilities and an expanded ability to keep pace with, or even create, new and emerging opportunities. Organizational resilience is seen as thriving because of the ability to capitalize on unexpected challenges and change, not just returning to established benchmarks. This view is linked with a firm's ability to absorb complexity, interpret events, call on an extended resource network, and emerge from the challenging situation stronger and with a greater repertoire of actions to draw from than were available before the disruptive event. Resilience enables a firm to leverage its resources and capabilities to not only resolve current dilemmas but also build toward a successful future. A transformational perspective on organizational resilience is related to dynamic competition, high-velocity environments, anticipatory organizational strategies, and positive organizational scholarship.

Both perspectives incorporate a number of common elements in describing the characteristics of resilient organizations. These fall into three general categories: cognitive, behavioral, and contextual characteristics of the organization and its environment. Those who advocate a transformational view of organizational resilience argue that managers can develop a firm's resilience capacity by making choices that shape the firm's experience and by making deliberate investments in these three arenas.

Cognitive elements capture the conceptual factors that shape what a firm notices, how it goes about interpreting events, the values and beliefs that ground the firm's culture and sense of meaning, and the processes that underlie its choices and behaviors. Resilient organizations are noted for mindfulness and resourcefulness. They are adept at what Karl Weick termed constructive sensemaking. The identity of resilient organizations is derived from a compelling ideology; a strong moral purpose; an enduring value system that serves as a gyroscope for responses, decisions, and interpretations; or some combination of these elements. In addition, organizational resilience seems linked to organizational self-efficacy. Resilient firms have an [Page 1161]experience-based confidence that they will be able to turn adversity to advantage, coupled with a strong performance orientation.

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