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Organizational resilience: A conceptual integrative framework

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2015

Deniz Kantur  and
Arzu İşeri-Say
Deniz Kantur
Affiliation:
Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Doğuş University, İstanbul, Turkey
Arzu İşeri-Say
Affiliation:
Department of Management, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Boğaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey
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Abstract

Increasingly chaotic business environments of today demand organizations to be more resilient. While the concept of resilience is widely discussed in disaster (e.g., Wildavsky, 1991) and crisis management literatures (e.g., Manyena, 2006), the literature on organizational resilience is developing disjointedly in organizational studies. The literature review suggests that some factors that are suggested in the literature as components of organizational resilience are sources contributing to the emergence of resilience in organizations. This study proposes an integrative framework for organizational resilience and introduces a new outcome concept of organizational evolvability, emphasizing the heightened sensitivity and increased wisdom of the post-event organization. In this model, sources of organizational resilience are categorized as perceptual stance, contextual integrity, strategic capacity and strategic acting, and organizational resilience leads to organizational evolvability as its outcome. The proposed organizational resilience framework attempts to provide a synthesis of the divergent literature on resilience and aims to strengthen organizational resilience research for richer theoretical and empirical progress.

Keywords

resilientorganizational resiliencedynamic environmentadaptive capacityrecoveryrenewalstrategic management
Type
Literature review
Information
Journal of Management & Organization , Volume 18 , Issue 6 , November 2012 , pp. 762 - 773
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management 2012

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