Organisational Resilience: An Investigation into Its Conceptualisation, Outcomes, and Boundary Conditions.

Scholarly organisational research effort to explain variability in operational performance, in the context of organisational disruptions, has focused largely on organisations’ risk management and crisis management capacity. Whilst research into risk and crisis management has provided interesting insights into how organisations deal with threats and disruptions to operations, scholarly knowledge on how and when organisational resilience helps sustain organisations’ operational performance under conditions of turbulence is limited. This is despite continuous calls on organisational researchers to examine the conceptual domain of the organisational resilience construct and its relations to key organisational outcomes. To address this deficiency, this study conceptualises organisational resilience as a multidimensional construct comprising the behavioural capabilities of monitoring and responding in relation to actual disruptions to operations, and anticipating, planning, implementing, and learning in relation to potential threats to operations. Given that knowledge is lacking on how organisational resilience is operationalised, this study follows established psychometric procedures to empirically measure the organisational resilience construct. The study then draws insights from resource based theory, contingency fit theory, resource orchestration, and social capital to investigate how organisational resilience is related to operational performance outcomes, under varying degrees of environmental turbulence and organisational resource conditions. To empirically examine the psychometric properties of the organisational resilience construct, 189 for-profit businesses in the United Kingdom (UK) were studied. Findings from the study show that organisational resilience is a superordinate multidimensional construct comprising the ability to monitor and respond, and anticipate, plan, implement, and learn, with respect to disruptions and threats to operations. Furthermore, findings show that increases in organisational resilience are associated with stronger operational performance. Additionally, the study finds the effect of organisational resilience on operational performance is strengthened when levels of environmental turbulence, and facets of socio-technical resources are high. However, findings show that the relationship between organisational resilience and operational performance is weakened under conditions of high organisational communication. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. In addition, opportunities for future research into organisational resilience from both management and applied psychology perspectives are outlined.