Organisational Resilience: A Propositional Study to Understand and Identify the Essential Concepts

Increased exposure to turmoil has raised business, social and governmental concerns over the ability of organisations to anticipate and respond positively to disruptions. Organisations are spending increased sums of money to raise levels of security; however, Organisational Resilience is a vague, multidisciplined and diverse philosophy, requiring a multiplicity of skills and knowledge that reaches far beyond security alone. The resilience domain is still developing and expanding; however, early embodiments of Organisational Resilience, originating in the United Kingdom and the United States, were nothing more than a rebranding of business continuity management strategies, put together as a ‘resilience processes’, or ‘resilience systems’. More recently ‘resilience management systems ’ claiming to emulate benefits that International Standards Organisation 9001 gave the Quality Assurance discipline have emerged, nevertheless, there is an absence of any clearly defined and researched compilation of the essential concepts that make up the theoretical structure of Organisational Resilience. It is argued that Organisational Resilience is not an overarching philosophy, strategy, process or management system, but rather a foundation comprising the outcomes from many applied domains. Nevertheless, Organisational Resilience can be defined as a sum of essential concepts. These essential concepts includ