Mitigating the “Cobra Effect” when pursuing organizational resilience

Abstract

This paper is a systematic literature review of organizational resilience. It aims to identify the reasons for the unintended consequences that may occur when organizations pursue resilience and how these unintended consequences could be mitigated. The analysis of 68 articles published between 2017 and 2022 indicates that organizations could have unintended consequences when pursuing organizational resilience, resulting from the organizational resilience conceptualization, models, practices, levels and the paradox of change. Consequently, several unintended consequences may arise when implementing a resilience strategy. This includes lessened leadership effectiveness, the pursuit of unrealistic objectives, low organizational creativity and innovation, overreliance on a single strategy, compromised values, fragile relationships, a short‐term focus and organizational culture. Therefore, the overall construct aspects of organizational resilience should be researched and analyzed further by gathering additional empirical data that sheds more light on these issues. Aside from the challenge of defining and measuring organizational resilience, there is variability in how organizational resilience is developed. It has also been operationalized in various ways, with limited insight into empirical methods to identify resilience against future hardships. Although the notion is promising, it has been criticized for being ambiguous and lacking a uniform explanation, diminishing its relevance for practice.