Inclusion Management Practices as a Pathway to Enhance Organizational Resilience in Response to a Crisis: An Empirical Test in the Context of the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Abstract

Organizations inevitably face various forms of disruptive events (e.g., external crises), and sustaining long‐term prosperity requires them to stay resilient when encountering unexpected adversity. Prior crisis management research predominantly relied on qualitative case studies to examine efforts after a crisis had occurred, treating the crisis as a “given” rather than a variable. The exceptionality of crisis situations and the ad hoc nature of crisis countermeasures largely limit current knowledge about how organizations may manage employees to remain in a preparative stance for disruptive events. Integrating the inclusion literature, crisis management research, and event system theory, we propose inclusion management practices as a viable pathway for organizations to develop resilience resources and capabilities prior to a crisis, allowing them to exhibit greater robustness and agility when a crisis arises. Such robustness and agility, in turn, enhance organizational performance thereafter. We further pinpoint the strength of a crisis event as an important contingency shaping the effects of pre‐crisis inclusion management practices on organizations’ resilient responses and thereby performance. We tested our hypotheses in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic crisis using longitudinal manager‐report survey data (N = 884 workplaces). We found that workplaces that implemented more inclusion management practices before COVID‐19 were more robust and agile in response to the pandemic crisis. Agility (but not robustness), in turn, was positively related to organizational performance. In addition, the effect of inclusion management practices on agility was stronger for workplaces with greater COVID‐19 event strength.