Four questions for organizational resilience: A review and a general framework for future research

Abstract

Understanding how organizations deal with frequent unexpected disruptions and thrive will be an important stream of management research, as times of predictability and manageable complexity which are considered as “business-as-usual” are slowly being left in the past. The long-term survival of a system in the presence of adversities can be effectively investigated through organizational resilience perspective. However, our literature review of the leading management journals has shown that there is fragmentation and ambiguity in responses to the four fundamental questions that would concern any construct: How is it different from what we already know? What is it? What leads to it? What are its consequences? In this work, we offer an integrative general framework which seeks answers to these four questions and sets a potentially fruitful direction for more focused future research. Specifically, organizational resilience research would notably benefit from investigating equifinality in achieving organizational resilience, processes of decision-making leading to it, and both temporal and multi-level trade-offs arising from it. Moreover, we not only align with previous calls for more large-scale empirical analysis, but also point out that new econometric methods may be necessary to pin down relevant causal mechanisms of organizational resilience.