A multilevel framework to enhance organizational resilience

Abstract

Organizational resilience is a capacity that emerges at multiple levels. Although the multilevel character of organizations has been generally acknowledged in existing organizational studies, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical studies that address how it affects organizational resilience. To adress this gap, this article offers a multilevel framework applicable to enhance organizational resilience and presents an empirical study to probe the impact of multilevel elements on organization's capacity for responding to critical situations. More specifically, the new framework will help an organization to enhance its resilience through a process of self-assessment on crisis preparedness and response capacity. This process will allow the organization to identify and remedy potential vulnerabilities in the interaction between its organs as well as environment. We argue that crisis management and organizational resilience are mutually shaped across multiple levels, from individual, organizational, to environmental. These multiple levels are operationalized operationalization in four phases: (1) reviewing and monitoring context, (2) testing preparedness, (3) analysing and assessing responses, and (4) strengthening capabilities. In these phases, we underline that resilience management requires continuous embracing of the dynamic processes within an organizational system and its environment. To validate the framework, we present an empirical study on a security organization, and describe the results to demonstrate how to utilise the tool in practice. In conclusion, we discuss how the multilevel framework can be further applied towards building stronger resilience management.

Keywords:

• Resilience
• crisis management
• multilevel analysis
• organizational learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The term “sociomaterial” refers to the entanglements of the social, i.e. beliefs, trust, personal ties, norms, values, etc. and the material, i.e. computers, buildings, communication devices, etc. The configuration of these entities constitutes organizational life and shapes how organization performs.

Additional information

Funding

The research was conducted at the Future Resilient Systems at the Singapore-ETH Centre, which was established collaboratively between ETH Zurich and Singapore’s National Research Foundation (FI 370074011) under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise programme.