Building traits for organizational resilience through balancing organizational structures

Abstract

This paper describes and explains how balancing organizational structures can build traits for organizational resilience. Organizational resilience is a holistic and complex concept. In this paper, we move beyond focusing on sudden and disruptive events in favour of anticipating the unexpected in daily organizing. Organizational resilience is understood here as building traits of risk awareness, preference for cooperation, agility and improvisation and is analysed by means of a longitudinal qualitative case study. The paper contributes to the field by showing how balancing organizational structures can foster organizational resilience traits. We show that power distribution and normative control can create preparedness for unexpected events and foster action orientation at the same time as supporting organizational alignment.

Hotels in contexts of uncertainty: Measuring organisational resilience

“…However, resilience can be analysed from another approach, which involves studying what a resilient organisation does or what it aims to achieve (e.g., Ruiz-Martin et al, 2018 ). Thus, as Andersson, Cäker, Tengblad, and Wickelgren (2019) suggest, resilience is both process and result. To this end, it is necessary to identify how a resilient organisation behaves, and the literature offers different answers to that question.…”

The Mediating Role of Initiative Climate on the Relationship between Distributed Leadership and Organizational Resilience in Schools

“…The former involves restructuring in the face of destructive change (Horne & Orr, 1998;Kantur & İşeri-Say, 2015;Somers, 2009) and the latter is about the ability to adapt to possible crises (Barasa, Mbau & Gilson, 2018) and adapting to problems (Zhang & Liu, 2012). As a response to multiple destructive events (Back, Ross, Duncan, Jaye, Henderson & Anderson, 2017;Paton, Smith & Violanti, 2000;Sahebjamnia, Torabi & Mansouri, 2018), it highlights the need for an adaptive approach to complexity and unpredictability (Andersson et al, 2019). It also requires system agility and robustness to survive and thrive (Kuntz, Malinen & Näswall, 2017).…”

“…This allows them to collaborate with their colleagues, resulting in increased commitment and loyalty to ensure organizational success (Taşkın, 2016). Moreover, school principals' distributed leadership also improves IJCER (International Journal of Contemporary Educational Research) organizational resilience in the face of drastic changes (Andersson, Cäker, Tengblad & Wickelgren, 2019;Coutu, 2002;Horne, 1997;Linnenluecke, 2017).…”

The Impact of Organisational Resilience on Construction Project Success: Evidence From Large-Scale Construction in China

“…Organisational resilience is not only a multi-level concept, but also a multi-dimensional concept. It is the result of the interaction between the organisation and the external environment (Andersson et al, 2019). Due to the ambiguity and uncertainty of the concept definition, scholars had relatively large differences in the division and measurement of organisational resilience dimensions.…”