Organizational resilience and digital resources: Evidence from responding to exogenous shock by going virtual

Abstract

Recent events have renewed attention to how organizations rely on digital resources in response to exogenous shock. Though the literature on organizational resilience indicates that this is best understood as a process through which organizational actors respond to a specific shock, most IS research attends to resilience as an outcome. Against that backdrop, we present a case study of how a university shifted to virtual teaching in response to a government-imposed lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Adopting a digital resourcing perspective allowed us to reveal the organizational resilience process and the way digital resources shaped it. We found that the resilience process unfolded in stages as educators, assisted by students, managers, and IT personnel pivoted, adapted, and normalized into teaching virtually. Across these stages, digital resources took on specific roles as the resilience process progressed from the organization’s pre-shock accumulation of digital resources into its continued digitalization efforts. Based on these findings, we contribute to existing literature by advancing and empirically substantiating a process view of the role of digital resources in organizational resilience.