The impacts of information technology and managerial proactiveness in building net-enabled organizational resilience

Abstract

The ability of an organization to generate variety is important for enhancing its organizational resilience when faced with volatilities from the environment. Using the context of integrated multichannel net-enabled retail organizations, we conceptualized organizational resilience as a higher-order capability comprising of two capabilities in terms of innovativeness and agility. Innovativeness reflects the scope aspect while agility represents the speed aspect of resilience. Based on a survey of 125 net-enabled retail organizations, we found that high levels of information technology capability and managerial proactiveness both significantly enhance organizational resilience. In addition, more resilient organizations perform better under turbulent environments. The construction of metrics to measure organizational resilience and the development of a structural model to elucidate the resilience building process and its performance consequences provide useful managerial and research implications. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.