Different response paths to organizational resilience

Abstract

An essential yet understudied aspect of organizational responses to an environmental shock is how managers interpret and respond to their new environments and address post-shock environmental challenges. The post-shock managerial response process can be intense and highly consequential as actors often must challenge the status quo in a compressed period. Decisions are frequently “life or death” in terms of organizational survival. This study analyzed data on resilient organizations’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis and offered a model of organizational response paths to resilience. Our grounded theorizing offers three primary contributions: (1) we add richness to the distinction between organizations that are resilient or not by highlighting different response paths within the organizational-resilience category; (2) we complement the notion of post-adversity growth by explaining how organizations grow during adversity; (3) we move beyond explanations of resilience based on differences in organizations’ resource endowments and instead provide new insights into different paths to resilience based on differences in how organizations interpret and respond to the same adverse event.