Unraveling ambiguities - exploring organizational resilience and its dimensions

Abstract

Resilience is important for an organization to survive and thrive in the dynamic environments in which it operates. Despite studies on individual and team resilience, research on organizational resilience is limited and plagued with problems of ambiguity regarding the definition of organizational resilience and its dimensionality. This paper will propose a set of dimensions for organizational resilience and definitions for the associated concepts through a review of the literature on organizational resilience with a special emphasis on indexed journals obtained from Hinari, Ebsco, Scopus, and Web of Science using the keywords resilience, organizational resilience, organizational resilience, and crisis. The review critically analyses the definitions, and the dimensions used from the indexed articles and proposes readiness, response, and recovery as the dimensions of organizational resilience. It defines organizational resilience as the organization’s demonstration of readiness, response, and recovery in the face of disruptions such as pandemic situations, economic crises, and brain drain that are common to all organizations.