Resilience, robustness, and antifragility: Towards an appreciation of distinct organizational responses to adversity

Abstract

Hillmann and Guenther provide an extensive review of research into organizational resilience in which they examine the different conceptualisations of the concept and their associated measurement scales. Their article emphasises stability, rather than other domains such as growth, as core to organizational resilience. We argue that this emphasis does not acknowledge the overlap between resilience and associated but distinctly different concepts like robustness and antifragility as observable phenomena in organizational responses to adversity. To extend Hillmann and Guenther's work, we therefore conceptually contrast resilience with robustness and antifragility so that future research might craft a more nuanced understanding of the presence of all three concepts in management research, which is currently dominated by resilience.