Organizational Post-Traumatic Growth: How Disasters Affect Responsiveness to Environmental Forces

Prior studies have emphasized that learning from natural disasters is crucial to increasing preparedness for similar threats in the future. Yet, our understanding of the wider effects of learning through natural disasters on organizational capabilities and responsiveness to unrelated environmental forces is limited. Natural disasters radically change organizational worldviews, and this change is likely to affect the organization far beyond preparedness to future disasters. Based on this idea, we model how being affected by a natural disaster triggers a change in organizational values and beliefs towards a higher prosociality that, in turn, favors organizational sensitivity to the environment, and its latent threats and opportunities, both directly and through the development of explorative capability. Our findings suggest that organizations surviving a natural disaster are reborn with improved capabilities to respond not only to future disaster threats but also and more strongly to unrelated social changes, such as population aging and growing demand for sustainable products. To capture these effects, we develop the concept of organizational post-traumatic growth. Through this richer explanation and empirical assessment, we contribute to a greater clarity of how, amidst heaps of debris and rubble, some organizations are able rise from their ashes with renewed capabilities and strength.