Systematic literature review on the impact of multifunctional training on organizational resilience

Sofía García Manglano, Julien Maheut, Julio Juan García Sabater and Angel Ruiz

Cuadernos de Gestión, 2026

Abstract: [EN] This systematic literature review examines how multifunctional training (MT) contributes to organisational resil-ience (OR) and how this relationship has been modelled and measured. Following PRISMA procedures, 87 studies were synthesised through descriptive analysis and a structured qualitative coding framework addressing three re-search questions. First, we map the methodological approaches used to study the MT–OR relationship and assess the extent to which uncertainty and human and organisational aspects are explicitly incorporated. Second, we syn-thesise the enablers and barriers affecting MT implementation and operationalisation, coding only mechanisms that are modelled, measured, or empirically reported. Third, we consolidate the metric families used to evaluate MT’s contribution to organisational resilience. Results show that the literature predominantly operationalises MT as a skill-coverage architecture and assesses resilience through operational performance proxies under variability (e.g., flow time, work in progress, tardiness, service level, utilisation). Explicit barriers most frequently relate to cost and feasibility frictions (training cost, productivity loss, robustness–cost trade-offs), while coordination mechanisms, organisational conditions, and competence dynamics are less consistently formalised. Overall, the evidence high-lights a measurement gap: resilience benefits are widely reported but rarely quantified end-to-end under uncertainty with deployability and human dynamics. The review proposes an agenda for integrating uncertainty-aware mod-elling with organisational and behavioural realism to enable comparable, decision-relevant evaluation of MT as a resilience strategy.

Keywords: organizational resilience; multifunctional training; cross-training; workforce flexibility; uncertainty; demand variability; resiliencia organizacional; formación multifuncional; cross-training; flexibilidad laboral; incertidumbre; variabilidad de la demanda (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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