An Organizational Resilience for Structural Sustainability Framework in the Post-Pandemic Era

Introduction

Organizations seek to improve resilience of structure and functions, assets and infrastructure against disruption, degradation, and destruction. Organizational resilience can be evaluated on its facilities, infrastructure, and supply chains (Kohno et al. 2012). Organizational resilience is considered as a second‐order construct but manifests at the first‐order level constructs identified by Richtnér and Löfsten (2014) as cognitive, structural and emotional resources linked to organizational creativity. Resilience is also the considered as the ability to absorb, stabilize the system structure, achieve function and identity in the cope of shocks.

A methodology to develop organizational resilience is based on structures and processes aimed to enhance the ability to respond to disruptions and create opportunities (Denyer, 2017, 20). Organizational resilience can be defined in terms of its outcome or what does, as “the maintenance of positive adjustment under challenging conditions such that the organization emerges from those conditions strengthened and more resourceful” (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003; Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007).

Enhancing organizational resilience has a variety of concepts, principles, approaches, guidelines, and elements which combined enable to design a framework to be implemented at different organizational levels combined with varied factors at each level, creating and developing a theoretical model to influence organizational resilience. The concept of organizational resilience can be a single at the organizational level or multi‐level concept (Linnenluecke, 2017) constructed and achieved at different organizational collective levels. Organizational resilience from the perspective of individual level is based on the inference that the organization is resilience as its individuals (Coutu, 2002; Horne, 1997; Horne and Orr 1998; Mallak 1998; Shin et al. 2012).

The concept of organizational resilience emerges from cognitive and engineering sciences among others to create and develop a framework for structural construct of organizational resilience supported on elements based on flexibility of organizational culture, organizational safety and reliability, the promotion elements, and the deployment of organizational resources. The analysis of data and information emerged from the research within the theoretical framework of adaptive socio-economic systems based on socio-ecology and sustainability after the COVID-19 pandemics and the co-managament and resilience needed.

An example we can cite of organizational resilience in healthcare, where a number of strategies with different characteristics and indicators have been developed to be able to assess organizational resilience (Ignatowicz et al., 2023), the different organizations that has experienced a cyberattack in the last years and have to developed new capabilities in response to that threat become more resilient in relation to a global pandemic (Hepfer & Lawrence, 2022), as well as the education sector, which responded to the blockade during COVID-19, presenting evidence of how schools around the world responded resiliently (Nielsen et, al., 2023).

Research on organizational resilience has grown significantly over the past three decades – but it has done so in an increasingly disorganized manner (Hepfer & Lawrence, 2022), that theoretical and empirical studies in organizational resilience have limited contributions on the concepts of high-reliability organization. Evenseth et al., (2022) review 59 publications of organizational resilience presented in the last 10 years that included different industries and countries that empirical, conceptual or in a literature review trying to find more usable information to connect all those capabilities that the organization must bring together in order to develop organizational resilience, if organizational resilience is improved and strategic and operational elements are combined, the organization will be able to manage risk more effectively (Guillen et al., 2022).