Growth in the Face of Crisis: The Role of Organizational Resilience Capabilities

In highly volatile and uncertain times organizations need to develop a resilience capacity, which enables the organization to cope effectively with unexpected events, bounce back from crisis, and even foster future success. Although academic interest in organizational resilience has steadily grown in recent years, the processes and dimensions of organizational resilience largely remained a “black box”. This paper wants to help closing this research gap. It provides a critical review of previous work on organizational resilience and develops a process-oriented conceptualization of the construct. This conceptualization suggests three dimensions of organizational resilience (anticipation, coping, and learning) and gives an overview of underlying capabilities and routines. Thereby, it deepens our understanding of the complex and embedded construct and can act as a foundation for future empirical work.