Young Ideas to Improve Organizational Resilience in Turbulent and Changing Environments

Introduction

Change is the defining element of current business reality. Organizations operate in increasingly dynamic global markets, and their interconnected nature leads to inequalities and risky spatial dynamics (Fischbacher-Smith & Smith, 2015). In these turbulent periods, organizations experience disruptions that present several threats to their long-term survival (Burnard & Bhamra, 2011). In this context, traditional strategic planning models, characterized by market predictability, which were perfectly adequate in a not so distant past, are no longer effective. Instead, companies must continually strive to adapt their strategies to different requirements, intense competition and rapid changes in consumers’ tastes. Therefore, flexibility and continuous adaptation are the key elements for successfully achieving organizational objectives (Hamel & Välikangas, 2003), that is, to survive and prosper in a changing and unpredictable environment.

Lengnick-Hall and Beck (2016) argue that resilience capacity favors companies’ agility and ability to recognize the need for adapting to changing environmental conditions. In the context of engineering, for instance, a system’s resilience can be enhanced by increasing its ability to quickly adapt to new situations that might arise (Dalziell & McManus, 2004). Under disruptive conditions and drastic changes, resilient organizations manage to maintain positive adjustments (Dahles & Susilowati, 2015; Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003), which in turn, enable them to survive and achieve their objectives. However, developing agile business models that can adapt quickly in dynamic environments is a challenging task. On many occasions, companies’ formal structures and their employees’ refusal to change make them inflexible and unable to the take decisions on time (Smith, Binns, & Tushman, 2010). In these instances, companies are more likely to carry out poor strategies that are disconnected from reality, leading to equally poor results, which can potentially force them out of business.

The addressed contributions show that organizational resilience is essential to respond to the inevitable and continuous changes that characterize current business environments. In this context, it is important to know what make companies more resilient, so that managers can cultivate these traits in order to make their organizations more adaptable and competitive. Although the subject of resilience has received increasing academic attention since the early 2000’s (Hamel & Välikangas, 2003; Jamrog et al., 2006), the concept is normally seen as an outcome, which emerges when individuals and organizations perform well and manage to bounce back from disruptive situations (Duchek, 2014). Meanwhile, the process of organizational resilience – and most of all, the factors that contribute to it – are still largely unexplored. Several authors believe that resilience capacity is favored by having young employees in executive positions and including them in the company’s decision-making process. Boschma and Groen (2010), for instance, believe that the so-called neo-digital natives, or Generation Z, are not “programmed” to follow traditional managing methods, and therefore, are more open to changes and new ways of planning and executing strategies. In this context, empowering them to make strategic decisions may favor the adoption of counter-intuitive or unconventional measures, which in turn, might help develop the company’s resilience capacity. These arguments are in line with those from Hamel and Välikangas (2003) and Stoltz (2004), and imply that younger generations are better suited to provide intuitive solutions that are adequate to the current the business reality.