Defining, Conceptualizing, and Measuring Organizational Resilience: A Multiple Case Study

Ruijun Chen, Yaping Xie and Yingqi Liu
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Ruijun Chen: School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Yaping Xie: School of Economics and Management, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 100044, China
Yingqi Liu: School of Economics and Management, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 5, 1-25

Abstract: Organizational resilience is an important means of coping with crises. This concept has received much attention within both academia and industry. However, research on the definition and measurement of organizational resilience is still in the exploratory stage. To date, studies on organizational resilience have yielded mixed conclusions, which makes it difficult to provide specific recommendations for coping with crises. This paper uses an exploratory case study approach to explore the process of organizational resilience among six highly resilient companies: Southwest Airlines, Apple, Microsoft, Starbucks, Kyocera, and Lego. We employed grounded theory to distill the main characteristics of organizational resilience, to explore and validate its structural dimensions, and to develop a measurement scale for organizational resilience. Further, we conducted reliability and validity analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and validation factor analysis on the 526 valid data collected. Results show that organizational resilience includes five dimensions: capital resilience, strategic resilience, cultural resilience, relationship resilience, and learning resilience. The measurement scale has good reliability and validity, which better reflects the notion of organizational resilience. This study bridges the gaps in the existing literature on organizational resilience and its measurement scales, and provides a foundation for future research.

Keywords: organizational resilience; dimensions; multiple case study; scale development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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