Measuring Organizational Resilience: A Scale Development

Today's business context is characterized by hyper competition, uncertainty, and ambiguity.Added to this is the unfortunate increase in the occurrence and the intensity of the natural disasters and crises situations including economic, political and social events.Accordingly, all the changes in the external environment amplified the significance of 'resilience' for all organizations.Resilient individuals and organizations positively adapt to changing conditions without showing any stress (Mallak, 1998), and thus today organizations desire to be resilient to easily adapt to changing circumstances and move forward.Organizational resilience term is highly adopted in organizational theory field and specifically in crisis management and disaster management literatures, and recently in strategic management literature.Yet, there is not an agreed upon and commonly accepted scale of organizational resilience.Accordingly, the organizational resilience literature is yet to develop regarding quantitative studies.This study attempts to fill this gap by developing a reliable and valid scale of organizational resilience construct through adopting both qualitative and quantitative methods. 1.INTRODUCTIONIn today's business context, organizations are faced with increased level of pressure from external environment due to rapidly changing business circumstances.The competition intensifies each day and there is increased occurrence of crisis and disaster situations.In such a context, resilience has become a high concern for both practitioners and academicians.The concept of resilience is rooted in psychology and ecology literature.In the management literature, the concept is mostly adopted in crisis and disaster management studies.With the increased level of uncertainty in the external environment, resilience also started to become a central concern in strategic management literature as an important concept for organizations to ensure continuity, sustainability and future success.Accordingly, organizational theory, strategic management, organizational behavior and human resources management literatures progressively focused on resilience at the organizational level.The studies mostly concentrated on conceptualizing the resilience term at the organizational level and analyzing its relationships with both internal and external factors.While practitioner, theoretical and qualitative studies abound in the literature, the quantitative studies are at the early stages of their