An application of the COA Framework: Building a sound foundation for organizational resilience

Abstract

Modern organizations must develop key capabilities to navigate an increasingly uncertain, fast moving, and challenging environment. Business research has identified firm resources and capabilities such as human capital, financial resources, and IT infrastructure that can drive organizational resilience, but has failed to explicate the mechanisms through which this is achieved. We propose and empirically test the role of collective mindfulness as a microfoundation level capability by which organizational resources can be used to develop and sustain the collective capability of organizational resilience. We further showcase how the commonly applied PLS-SEM method can be extended through the inclusion of predictive methodology, specifically the COA framework. In doing so we reveal predictive evidence that the model generalizes well and abductive evidence of the potential moderating effect of firm size on the relationship between financial resource availability and collective mindfulness. This article thus serves as a showcase for researchers wishing to supplement traditional inferential research with predictive and abductive practices to improve the rigor and robustness of conclusions and extend theory.