100% Operational! An organizational resilience perspective on ports as critical infrastructures

Abstract

Worldwide, ports are considered as critical infrastructure (CI). Their continued operation is of key concern for government, business, and society at large. A key lever that ensures ports’ continuing operations is their organizational resilience, which is the capability to anticipate and cope with the threats organizations face and to adapt to those threats. Organizational resilience has received scant attention in the port-specific literature to date, so we lack an understanding of how ports anticipate and cope with the threats and risks that they face to stay operational. This is a concern because, in the event of a port failure, disruption, or shutdown, the impact on our daily life and routines can be far-reaching and significant. In this study, we identify relevant attributes that make a port resilient to ensure its operational continuity. By bridging the organizational resilience and port literature, we develop a port resilience framework that we illustrate with anecdotal evidence from the Port of Antwerp. This paper advances our understanding of organizational resilience in the context of ports as critical infrastructure and guides practitioners in their development of a resilient port organization.