Organisational resilience: Development of a conceptual framework for organisational responses

Abstract

Over recent years, the concept of resilience has gained increasing support within the academic community. Given the potentially devastating implications of disruptions, understanding the dynamics of successful adaption within organisations yields an important avenue for future research. This theoretical article will focus on addressing the features detection and activation within the response of an organisation to disruptive events. Through this, a conceptual framework of a resilient organisational response is presented. As such, this article will focus on establishing a solid conceptual base for organisational resilience upon which future empirical studies can be based. This article outlines the background literature relating to resilience and presents a working definition for organisational resilience. The conceptual framework supports analytical thinking toward characterising the response of an organisation to disruptive events and aims to support organisational development through outlining the fundamental processes necessary for an organisation to elicit a resilient response. Finally, conclusions are presented and attention is drawn to the implications of resilience on small and medium-sized enterprises and future research directions are outlined. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.