Empirical Research on Organizational Resilience:

How far have we come?

Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management of the

German Academic Association for Business Research

07.10.2013

Julia Hillmann

(Supervisor: Edeltraud Guenther)

Faculty of Business and Economics,

Chair of Environmental Management and Accounting

Technische Universität Dresden

Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

(1) Sustainability and Resilience: two concepts that match?

(2) Resilience and Organizational Resilience – same, but different?

(3) Systematic literature review

(4) General findings about literature

(5) Towards a research agenda

• Definition of organizational resilience

• Factors of organizational resilience

• Context in which organizational resilience is studied

• Relationships to other concepts

Agenda

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Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

Winn & Kirchgeorg

(2005)

“Among a growing number of scientists […] a new dialogue is emerging around a new idea, resilience: how to help vulnerable people, organizations and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions. Where sustainability aims to put the world back into balance, resilience looks for ways to manage in an imbalanced world.”

(Andrew Zolli)

Sustainability and Resilience: two concepts that match?

3

Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

Resilience in the context of organizations – What is the difference?

Resilience and Organizational Resilience – same, but different

4

Other research disciplines Management research

• Resilience of organizations (for-profit)

• the notion of uncertainty, complexity, and

turbulence is added (e.g., McCann and Selsky, 2012;

Välikangas and Romme, 2012; Reinmoeller and van Baardwijk, 2005)

• supporting companies to create capabilities that help them to survive and thrive in changing environments

Resilience for what?

Resilience of what?

Resilience to what?

Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

• Systematic literature review (Fink, 2010)

• Search strings:

• Source:

(1) Top Journals: Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Organization Science

(Short et al., 2002)

(2) Database: Business Source Complete (EBSCO), Emerald, Web of Science

• Search results: 1042 articles

• Excluded: book reviews, resilience as personality trait, resilience at community level, resilience of built environment

Overall: 69 references analysed

Methodology

5

„corporate resilience“

„business resilience“

„organi?ational resilience“

„management resilience“

„industry resilience“

resilience

data OR empirical OR finding*

OR test OR statistical OR

evidence OR result*

(Davis and Han, 2004)

+ measur*

AND

Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

Need for more empirical evidence on larger samples

General findings in the literature

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Literature on organizational resilience is highly diverse Many practitioner articles were found (19)

• Roughly half of the studies were empirical studies (31) • Few quantitative studies (11) • Majority were case studies (26) Empirical literature still

remains on a conceptual and exploratory level

Need for a clear and valid constructs and distinction to existing concepts in management

Need for more rigor of resilience within managent research

• No common agreement on how to measure organizational resilience a clear and valid construct is missing

• Link to organization theory not strong enough

13 articles found in top journals not yet a topic of high quality journals?

Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

Looking at the following 4 aspects:

Towards a research agenda

7

Context in which organizational resilience is studied

Definition of organizational resilience

Factors of organizational resilience

Relationships to other concepts

Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

A definition of organizational resilience

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• Only definitions included where authors (n = 29) gave their own definition of ‚organizational resilience‘

• Searched for ‚abstract‘ categories that describe components of definitions (similarities among definitions):

Organizational resilience is

„an ability to anticipate risks and future trends (prepare / before)

to understand the situation, to resist, and act thoughtful (response / during)

to recover fast, to adapt, and to renew or reinvent (recover / after)

while effectively aligning operational with corporate strategies to be able to survive in

turbulent and complex environments.”

When is

resilience

shown?

Resilience to

what?

Which kind of capability or capacity

is mentioned? Which

corporate level

is adressed:

strategic or

operational

level?

Before

the event

During

the event

After the

event

Components of ‚organizational resilience‘ definitions

Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

Factors of organizational resilience

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Components of OR Managementsystem (Practice)

Capabilities (Science)

Before the event

During the event

After the event

ability to under-stand situation

ability to anticipate Risk

ability to resist

ability to respond quickly

ability to act thoughtful

Crisis

strategic or operational level?

Strategic level

operational level

SCM Innovation

Scenario planning

BCM ERM

ability to recover (fast)

ability of renewal / reinventing

ability to adapt

ability to learn

• Few studies on an organizational resilience construct (Mallak, 1998, Somers, 2009,

McCann & Selsky, 2012, Stephenson, 2010)

• measured it as multi-dimensional construct BUT in different ways

Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

The context aspect is twofold:

(1) Distinction between discontinuous and continuous change:

• different capabilities needed

• BUT: researchers combine those types of change (in definition) but then focus on a certain shock or disruption in their analysis

could be clearer and more systematic

Role of continuous change needs more research

continuous change small-scale events not easily perceived by companies but accumulate over time and may result in an even bigger crisis (Rudolph and Repenning, 2002)

(2) Remember: different notion to resilience: complexity & uncertainty (turbulence)

• organizational resilience and the type of environment (McCann & Selsky, 2012, Smart &

Vertinsky, 1984)

• Perception of the environment and influence on organizational resilience (Judge & Douglas, 2009, Zsidin& Wagner, 2010, Dewald& Bowen ,2010)

Context in which resilience is studied

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Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

Relationship to other concepts

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Antecedents / Enablers Consequences Organizational resilience

vs. existing concepts

• organizational change capacity (Judge & Douglas, 2009)

• organizational buffering (Lynn, 2005)

• organizational flexibility (Hatum & Pettigrew, 2004)

• Routines (Lengnick-Hall &

Beck, 2005)

• Slack (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2007)

• Learning (Sutcliffe & Vogus,

2007, Burnard & Bhamra, 2011)

• Innovation (Stephenson, 2010,

Carmeli & Markman, 2011, Reinmoeller & van Baardwijk, 2005)

• Networks (McCann & Selsky,

2012, Stephenson, 2010)

• organizational performance (Stephenson,

2010, McCann et al, 2009)

Thank you for your attention!

Do you have any questions or comments?

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Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013

Burnard, K.; Bhamra, R. (2011): Organisational resilience: development of a conceptual framework for organisational responses. International Journal of Production Research, 49(18), pp. 5581–5599.

Lengnick-Hall, C. A. & Beck, T. E. (2005) Adaptive Fit Versus Robust Transformation: How Organizations Respond to Environmental Change. Journal of Management, 31 (5), 738–757.

Mallak, L. A. (1998): Measuring resilience in health care provider organizations. Health Manpower Management, 24(4), pp. 148–152.

McCann, J.; Selsky, J. W. (2012): Mastering Turbulence: The Essential Capabilities of Agile and Resilient Individuals, Teams and Organizations. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.

New York Times (2012): Learning to Bounce Back. [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/opinion/forget-sustainability-its-about-resilience.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [15 June 2013].

Reinmoeller, P.; van Baardwijk, N. (2005): The Link Between Diversity and Resilience. MIT Sloan Management Review, 46(4), pp. 61–65.

Short, J.C.; Ketchen, D. J.; Palmer, T. B. (2002): The Role of Sampling in Strategic Management Research on Performance: A Two-Study Analysis. Journal of Management, 28 (3), 363–385.

Stephenson, A. (2010) Benchmarking the Resilience of Organisations, PhD Thesis, Christchurch, University of Canterbury.

Somers, S. (2009): Measuring Resilience Potential: An Adaptive Strategy for Organizational Crisis Planning. Journal of Contingencies & Crisis Management, 17(1), pp. 12–23.

Vogus, T. J.; Sutcliffe, K. M. (2007): Organizational Resilience: Towards a Theory and Research Agenda. Conference Proceedings. ISIC. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics.

Välikangas, L.; Romme, G. L. (2012): Building resilience capabilities at „Big Brown Box, Inc.”, Strategy & Leadership, 40(4), pp. 43-45.

Winn, M.; Kirchgeorg (2005): Herausforderungen des Managements bei zunehmenden ökologischen Diskontinuitäten. In Burmann, C.; Freiling, J.; Hülsmann, M. (2005): Management von Ad-hoc-Krisen: Grundlagen - Strategien – Erfolgsfaktoren. Gabler Verlag, Wiesbaden, pp. 245-268.

References

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