Most organisations operate in a turbulent environment characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Disruptive and unpredictable forces of change are key features of this environment and sustainability of organisations has become fragile and unstable. Organisations that are able to grow and thrive within this environment have adaptive capabilities to learn (Ovans, 2005) and adjust faster with more confidence compared to their competitors. Leadership is a decisive influence in the creation of a competitive advantage within thriving organisations. Leaders absorb high levels of turmoil, unpredictability and uncertainty and need to respond to regular shocks and surprises in a productive manner so that the organisation can be responsive to threats and opportunities. The ability of leaders to offer this type of leadership is determined by their own levels of leadership resilience. Leadership resilience is a capability that can increase or diminish depending on the leader’s ability to learn and adapt following unexpected disruptive experiences, continued adverse conditions or while dealing with persistent pressure. Practices associated with self-renewal offer leaders, opportunities to develop disciplined intentional processes of change and adjustment. These are based on a state of awareness regarding one’s level of internal well-being, energy and balance, aimed at replenishing or strengthening resilient qualities and protective factors. Leadership development programmes can make a significant contribution to sustained leadership being effective, by developing personal strengths and strategies that can buttress tough resilience capabilities in leaders. The main research problem in this study was to explore the relationship between leadership resilience and self-renewal practices. To address the main and identified sub-problems, a literature study was conducted focusing on the main components of resilience with specific reference to resilience in leaders, while exploring self-renewal practices that can be used by leaders to improve their resilience. A web-based survey with a questionnaire was administered to a target group consisting of middle and senior managers who have participated in leadership development programmes at the Leadership Academy of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Business School. The survey was a self-reporting instrument that included the Leadership Resilience Profile developed by Dianne Reed and Jerry Patterson (2009) as well as a section focused on self-renewal practices that included physical, spiritual, cognitive and socio-emotional renewal practices. The results from the empirical study revealed that the levels of leadership resilience are related to the self-renewal practices of leaders. The study identified spiritual self-renewal as most significant to leadership resilience. Higher levels of resilience were demonstrated with regard to value-driven leadership, optimism, courageous decision-making and self-efficacy. Senior managers reported higher levels of self-efficacy as compared to their counterparts at middle level management. The study identified adaptability, perseverance and social support as resilience capabilities that leaders should grow. In general, lower scores were obtained for self-renewal practices than for resilience levels. Leadership development initiatives that integrate resilience capabilities and self-renewal practices will create an adaptive resource within organisations. Supporting the development and maintenance of strong leadership resilience capabilities will contribute to the development of adaptive organisations that are able to navigate turbulent conditions with confidence.

Disasters such as the recent parliament shooting in Ottawa, Superstorm Sandy, and the Great Japan Sea Earthquake and tsunami are reminders of the roles essential service organizations have in maintaining public health. On a daily basis, organizations are expected to operate under normal conditions, providing goods, services, and community supports. In crisis situations, it is critical that these organizations continue to operate and contribute to adaptive response and recovery in a community. Business continuity planning focuses on ensuring continued functioning of core operations during a disruption. Inherent to the business continuity field is a prevent-and-protect approach to preparedness activities. Asset-mapping exercises have the potential to balance the predominantly risk-based field by focusing on the strengths and capabilities already present within an organization. To understand the value of asset-mapping activities in business continuity plans (BCPs), indicators for organizational resilience are needed. Indicators have the potential to provide essential service organizations with a way to gauge the value of their BCP activities. In addition, this information can help guide decision-makers when developing BCPs. This research is part of a larger project at the University of Ottawa focused on building the empirical evidence base for BCPs and organizational resilience. This thesis, as a sub-study within the larger project, explores assets and indicators for organizational resilience to contribute to the effective evaluation and engagement of organizations in business continuity planning efforts. Emergent themes highlight the importance of assets and their contribution to the adaptive capacity of an organization in the event of a disaster. This study also provides an example list of 28 SMARTT organizational resilience indicators directly derived from organizational assets, providing information that researchers and essential service organizations can use to evaluate business continuity planning activities in relation to organizational resilience.

Background: the impetus for this study emanated from Covid-19 crisis in the context of Sweden's business environment in which numerous disruptions in business operations have been experienced. Organizational resilience has been selected as a positive strategic response by which resilience capabilities of sit-in restaurant managers in handling disasters and crises play an integral role so as to achieve future organizational success and continuity.  Purpose: To apply resilience theory and develop some underlying themes from effective application of  resilience strategies in sit-in restaurants during Covid-19 crisis. This thesis sought to identify similarities and differences in the application of organizational resilience strategies during crises. Resilience strategies categorized into four by Hillmann and Guenther (2020), that is, organizational flexibility, organizational adaptive capacity, organizational change capacity and organizational buffering capacity  were tested and laid the foundation for development of new theoretical framework.   Methodology: A qualitative study that involved six sit-in restaurants were randomly selected and the underlying themes of their resilience capabilities were analyzed. Semi-structured interviews and questionnaires were used to gather empirical data. Six interviews were conducted in which sit-in restaurant managers in Sweden were the interview participants. Findings: Research findings revealed that some sit-in restaurant managers were more resilient than others thereby contributing to survival of restaurants that they managed during crisis. Some managers only applied a selection of resilience strategies leading to declined resilience capabilities in managing crises contributing to business failure whereas an integrated approach in application of all resilience strategies contributed to effective crisis management. These findings laid the foundation for the development of new theory in organizational resilience.

Ce travail de recherche traite de l’engagement organisationnel au sein d’une association de Microfinance au lendemain d’un changement organisationnel. Une stratégie de sortie de crise a été mise en place dans le cadre dudit changement et a eu une incidence sur les contrats psychologiques des agents organisationnels et par conséquent sur les relations qui les lient à leur organisation (association).Notre objectif à travers l’adoption du contrat psychologique comme grille de lecture des contrats d’AL AMANA est d’expliquer les processus d’évolutions des contrats psychologiques individuels et collectifs des agents organisationnels suite à l’évènement du changement qui constitue, comme nous le verrons, un incident critique. Cela permettra de déterminer les facteurs intra-organisationnels et extra-organisationnels de l’évolution des contrats psychologiques qui impactent la résilience de l’organisation observée au sein de l’association et permettant la sortie de la crise. / This research is about the organizational commitment within a microfinance association after an organizational change. An exit strategy was put in place as part of this change and had an impact on the psychological contracts of the organizational agents and consequently on the relations that bind them to their organization (association).Our objective through the adoption of the psychological contract as a grid for reading AL AMANA's contracts is to explain the processes of evolution of the individual and collective psychological contracts of the organizational agents following the change event which constitutes, as we will see, a critical incident. This will help us to determine the intra-organizational and extra-organizational factors of the evolution of the psychological contracts that impact the resilience observed within the association and allowing it to exit the crisis.

The objective of this proposed research is to test whether interorganizational collaboration contributes to the ability of an organization to bounce back swiftly from disasters. The research questions are examined from the Institutional Collective Action (ICA) perspective. The general argument of this dissertation is that organizational resilience can be explained by interorganizational collaboration. The ICA framework, specifically, identifies two general network structures to explain strategies that can be adopted to minimize collaboration risks: bonding and bridging structures. This dissertation focuses on how governmental and nongovernmental organizations in South Korea collaborated. The data was collected from the southeastern tip of the Korean Peninsula in August of 2012, and January of 2013. The 2012 Typhoons devastated the area after the first data set was collected in August 2012, causing the loss of estimated US$ 730 million and 29 fatalities. Afterward, the second survey was administrated in January of 2013 to gauge respondents’ views on how organizations responded to the disasters. This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay presents a brief overview and assessment of the current research on resilience. The second essay empirically tests the sources of organization resilience. The third essay examines the dynamic nature of interorganizational ties by employing stochastic actor-based models. The findings show how organizations prefer to not coordinate with other organizations even though this could reduce their strains during a disaster. The findings also suggest that organizations that operate in higher risk areas or participate in joint full-scale exercises before a disaster form interorganizational ties afterward.

Resilience, in an organizational sense meaning the ability to withstand crises and disturbances, has become a keyword during the last ten years. It is associated with established activities like risk and crisis management and business continuity planning or with strategic management, but it allows for new perspectives and insights into the conditions for doing business. Applied to the whole supply chain it also provides tools for managing and aligning the logistics flows in an appropriate way. But why is resilience essential for success or survival? In context to the Swedish textile and clothing (T&amp;C) industry, the average number of firms that went bankrupt during the recent crisis (2007-09) escalated twofold compared to the average over 2000-10 due to tremendous pressure on the Swedish credit system. The structural industrial statistics also plummeted in these crisis years aggravating other inherent or internal problems as a ’ripple effect’. The small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) were the most affected of all, facing major threats to their financial performance and ultimately to their survival, at times of economic crises. In such a context, study of organizational resilience (ORes), to survive and thrive becomes increasingly significant. To address this issue the thesis concentrates on understanding the resilience development process through crisis strategic planning in context to Swedish textile-related SMEs amidst economic crises. It investigates and answers how resilience development can be considered as a precursor for business success, how to develop and monitor resilience, and identifies its antecedents and key strategic initiatives and their differential degrees of influence. No prior studies describing organizational resilience and crisis strategic planning in an integrated processual approach using both short-term and long-term strategies through planning and adaptation were found in the literature. The thesis adopts a critical realist-grounded theory (CR-GT) approach along the metaphysical level as the structure for the resilience development process follows a causal relationship between the object (the organization), its structure (competences and strategies), the causal power (crisis strategic planning) for attaining an event/outcome (resilience) in a particular context (economic crisis). For addressing this issue of devising an outcome-based processual approach, a multivariate financial indicator called the Altman’s Z-score (used basically for calculating bankruptcy potential in firms) was used for quantifying resilience. For investigating the causal mechanism epistemological relativism along the grounded theory approach was chosen for theory generation. A mixed methodology was adopted based on quantitative statistical analyses, at first, followed by a detailed qualitative work based on surveys, interviews, case studies and secondary data for data triangulation. Analysis of data was conducted through certain thematic coding principles. A four-step hermeneutic spiral was followed by systematically combining the pre-understanding, empirics and extant literature to develop a theoretical framework through constant modification. Overall, the resilience development was highlighted along a processual framework adopted along the CR-GT view of causation. The findings are manifold. Firstly there is a need to develop economic resilience in SMEs to shift from just component-view to a more holistic systemic view of organizations, upheld by an integrated crisis strategic planning (CSP) approach, for facing dynamic environments. Secondly, the CSP process prescribed in the thesis is quite integrated and holistic, taking a view from all angles, viz. organizational structure (capabilities and strategies), processual approach etc. Such a resilience development process through CSP is based on a six-step process: (i) identification of environmental context, (ii) impact analysis, (iii) leadership analysis, (iv) capability analysis, (v) formulation/selection and implementation of strategies, and (vi) evaluation and review of strategic options, utilizing a suite of strategic tools and techniques and is particularly simple for application in an SME setting. Third, operationalization of such a causal mechanism based upon implementation of strategic tools is based upon using a multivariate financial indicator like Altman’s Z-score to outline the relation between ORes and business ‘health’, thus quantifying it. Finally, in order to develop a resilient organization it is important to engage and utilize effectively the key resources and assets (financial, material, social, networks) by developing dynamic capabilities (strategic and operational flexibilities, redundancy, robustness) and organizational learning (culture, employee wellbeing, attentive leadership and decision-making). These competences must be employed for the appropriate strategy development (selection, implementation, and evaluation) framed on both growth and continuity strategies, both planned and adaptive in nature. The research develops a holistic analytical framework of organizational structure for resilience development based on these two criteria. It also tests this framework for Swedish textile-related SMEs amidst economic crises. The findings in this contextual delimitation suggest that the resilient SMEs possess better financial resources, relational networks, operational &amp; strategic flexibilities. The economically resilient firms mostly showed planned resilience in economic crises based on long-term strategies through business continuity planning (BCP) and in terms of growth strategies through market penetration, diversification and transformational initiatives. These firms also showed better short-term crisis management (CM) through higher operational flexibility while the less resilient ones lacked in strategic readiness due to resource scarcity. This is beneficial for firms to understand the key areas in which to invest and develop a multistrategic CSP model, categorizing firms along different resilience types – planned or adaptive. / <p>Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Science in Technology to be presented with due</p><p>permission for public examination and criticism in Festia Building, Auditorium Pieni Sali 1, at Tampere University of Technology, on the 11th of October 2013, at 12 noon.</p>

The notion of ‘organizational resilience’ has risen exponentially in recent years; it is the ability of an organization to ‘bounce back’ and continue key functions during disruptive events. The rise follows the will to better face the unforeseen and complex adversity that modern times throws at organizations. This study, following a single-case exploratory research design, aims to establish knowledge regarding organizational resilience in the humanitarian sector; by exploring the policy and practice of the United Nations. The author builds an Analytical Framework based on the leading research in the field of organizational resilience, in order to grasp an understanding of the organization's different beliefs, capabilities, and proficiencies necessary to establish and maintain a resilient organization. Concluding with the statement that while there are areas of challenges, the humanitarian sector provides a case not only to scrutinize, but also to learn from.

In this study, I investigated the precursors and the outcomes of team resilience. In contrast to many resilience studies, which focus on low-probability, high-impact challenges, I investigated resilience in the face of high-frequency, low-impact challenges that teams can face in their operational environments. I conducted an extensive literature analysis of the field of resilience and on the basis of this constructed a model of team resilience by integrating insights from high reliability organizing, positive organizational scholarship, sensemaking and disaster resilience studies. I then tested and improved this model through an exploratory study of team behaviour in two 'Escape Game' settings in which teams of 5 people worked through a series of puzzles under time-constrained and somewhat stressful conditions. Following the exploratory study, I developed the resilience model into an operationalizable format and tested it using seven runs of a simulation study involving 547 individuals in 68 teams. In the simulation, teams had to work both quickly and accurately whilst adapting to the changing conditions of a turbulent, competitive environment. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected on various team attributes, team resilience and team performance. I have used quantitative data as the main source of analysis and qualitative data as a supporting tool. Self-completion questionnaires, objective performance indicators, direct observation and post-simulation team and individual reflections were among the data collection tools that were used to obtain data. Team resilience shows highly significant associations with a range of objective measures of team performance. In turn, resilience is supported by several team attributes, including collective mental models, effective channels of communication and systems of information gathering and team cohesion. When teams faced challenges outside of their existing action repertoires their ability to improvise also contributed to resilience. Finally, when teams overcame (novel) challenges, this fed back into their accumulated knowledge through collective learning, enriching action repertoires. Together, these features bestow teams with resilience, which, in turn, enables them to overcome disturbances that might otherwise impede operational performance. In its final form, my resilience model serves as an explanation of the mechanisms of resilience and identifies its antecedents and outcomes. It can inform teams operating in uncertain, ambiguous and volatile work conditions about the capacities and capabilities they need in order to create and sustain resilience in daily operations.

Research intentionally addressing how leadership attributes and behaviors collectively contributed to the socioecological perspective of organizational resilience were not found. This is a problem for organizations who must hire without benefit of how a collective leadership effect might influence their psychological capital. The purpose of this study was to explore whether or not self-efficacy, psychological empowerment, personal resilience, and leadership style were associated with or predicted organizational resilience among clinical managers in an academic medical center setting. Metatheory of resilience and resiliency was used to frame the study. A quantitative correlational design was used. Self-reported data was collected via the Leader Efficacy Questionnaire, Psychological Empowerment Instrument, Connor and Davidson's Resilience Scale, Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, and Workplace Resilience Instrument. Intellectual stimulation (rs .480, Ï? .432, p = .00), personal resilience (rs .483, Ï? .465, p = .00), and self-efficacy (rs .522, Ï? .462, p = .00) had the highest statistical correlations to organizational resilience. Negative predictor effects were found for personal resilience and idealized attributes ascribed to self-oriented versus other-oriented resilience qualities, x2(2) = 50.70, p < .01, and p < .05 respectively. Resilience is important for organizational survival and adaptation to the external and internal forces of change. Resilient organizations with available reserves can collaborate with community leaders to optimize the social, environmental, and economic determinants of health foundational for community resilience and positive social change.

This dissertation examines how resilience against disaster is produced on a daily basis by Emergency Managers and private sector continuity professionals working in New York City. Drawing on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, it uses disaster anticipation as a case study in inter-organizational reliability and the interplay between materiality and culture in the processual reproduction of social life. I find that disaster risk managers conceptualize disasters as situations of abrupt mismatch between available material resources and the exigencies of critical tasks and routines. They use three interrelated types of strategies to anticipate these crises: (1) conducting persistent active monitoring and routine intervention in the organizational environment; (2) planning for the consequences, rather than triggers, of disasters; and (3) building a creative capacity to preserve or restore access to resources critical for the reproduction of social and organizational routines. Taken together, I argue, these strategies shed new light on how organizations collaborate across boundaries to build resilience against unexpected shocks. The empirical data provides a lever into deeper puzzles in sociology: how can we account for both the durability of social structures and sudden social change? In other words, what can we learn about the way social life is reproduced by better understanding the work of professionals employed by the state and major corporate firms to proactively manage the events that threaten to punctuate that continuity? This research advances the literature on organizational reliability, as well as the material turn in institutional theory, drawing attention to the role of material resources in the production and reproduction of cultural schemas.