The Concept of Organizational Resilience: Towards a Research Agenda

Resilience is generally seen as a desirable characteristic for organizations to deal with various types of unexpected, abrupt and/or ‘extreme’ change. However, despite the growing utilization of the concept in the popular press and academic research, there are few insights into the conceptualization, operationalization and empirical assessment of the concept. This paper seeks to identify the knowledge development and knowledge gaps in business scholarship on organizational resilience and provides a systematic review of the concept of organizational resilience. The review is presented in form of a bibliometric analysis based on citation data acquired from the Social Sciences Citation Index. The final dataset contained 214 citation records published between 1977 and 2011. The results of the analysis suggest the following key findings: (1) Research on organizational resilience is highly fragmented with sparse conceptual development, (2) resilience has been studied mostly through case examples in a wide variety of contexts and settings, yet findings are often not integrated (3) existing attempts to detect resilience (or absence thereof) have employed retrospective analyses after an adverse impact has occurred, but provide little insights into predictive factors leading to future resilience. We conclude by outlining pathways for future research.