Inside the Onion: Understanding What Enhances and Inhibits Organizational Resilience

Organizational resilience refers to an organizations’ capacity to withstand changes over time. Most existing models of organizational resilience have not been empirically tested and/or tend to focus on “what resilience is” and little attempt has been made to investigate factors that enhance and/or diminish an organization’s resilience. This qualitative research study, therefore, seeks to advance theorizing about organizational resilience by identifying and exploring both the enablers and inhibitors of organizational resilience. Longitudinal interview data are analyzed to explore employees’ perceptions about what has impacted their organization’s ability to cope with change. A conceptual model of organizational resilience is proposed. The contributions of this model are that it is the first, to our knowledge, to (1) propose a multilevel conceptualization of organizational resilience, and (2) include within the model the idea that earlier changes can both enhance and inhibit the organizations’ current ability to cope with change