empirical research on organizational resilience - institute for
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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
2
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
6
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
8
• 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
9
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
10
Julia Hillmann Autumn meeting of the Section Sustainability Management, 7 October 2013
Relationship to other concepts
11
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)
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
13