Resilience has become a contentious word, with governments, international organizations, communities, businesses and individuals increasingly using the word but not necessarily understanding its meaning. More so, there is an expectation from both media and society that anything and everything can always be resilient. In an organizational sense, resilience means the ability to anticipate, adapt and recover from both unexpected (e.g., disasters) and continuous disruptions (e.g, technology). Building resilience in organizations can facilitate them to bounce back (survive) or bounce forward (thrive).
For the last 13 years, I have been researching both small and large organizations in the tourism and hospitality sectors that have endured numerous challenges such as earthquakes, terrorist attacks, pandemics and climate change. Each of these different types of disasters and crises poses unique challenges as they differ in terms of intensity, duration and impact, which affect the ability of organizations to respond and recover. So how did these organizations improve their resilience?
First, they draw on internal resources (e.g., assets, finance, technology) and relationships between management and staff to rapidly respond. This can take the form of creative solutions to problems, including new products, offering more online services, improving customer relationship management etc. For instance, employees can be a strong source of resilience for organizations. In fact, when employee resilience is high, organizations tend to be more resilient. This means that a diverse and multiskilled workforce is a necessary requirement for resilient organizations, but this is insufficient as leadership and human resource practices matter. Also, teams can be an effective source of employee and organizational resilience. When teams are strong and can adapt quickly to disruptions, they facilitate organizations to respond effectively. Thus, building team resilience can make organizations more resilient.
Second, they can draw on external resources (e.g., govt. subsidies, tax rebates, digitalization schemes offered by industry bodies) but also external relationships with suppliers and communities to navigate difficult times. The stronger external relationships are, the more embedded organizations are in their communities and therefore they tend to be more resilient. During earthquakes and pandemics, organizations that rely on multiple suppliers (local and overseas) had fewer disruptions than those who relied on a few. Thus, building resilience in supply chains can contribute to strengthen the resilience of organizations. Yet, without govt at national and local levels, as well as industry bodies putting in place policies that support recovery, organizations will find it difficult to thrive. Thus, governance of sectors and industries matter in building resilient organizations and communities.
Third, they can draw on capabilities – these are essentially strategic and dynamic know-how, which is more intangible and difficult to replicate by others. Organizations can draw on these dynamic capabilities, which may include their ability to understand a rapidly changing environment and reconfiguring knowledge to respond to ongoing challenges. Organizations with different types of dynamic capabilities tend to me more resilient. In essence, they have a know-how on how to combine processes, procedures, and resources internally and externally to respond and recover from adversity. Such organizations are not only more resilient but can also undertake more fundamental transformations in their business models to respond in difficult times.
Despite these advances in how to understand organizational resilience and what makes organizations more resilient, measuring resilience in such environments remains a key challenge for organizations and researchers. There is no agreed way of measuring it and what indicators to use. Some organizations and researchers conflate resilience with sustainability and therefore tend to use sustainability indicators to measure resilience. While resilience and sustainability in an organizational context are inextricably linked, the two are not synonymous. For smaller, micro and social enterprises it becomes difficult for them to know what to prioritise when building resilience and how to measure it.
Writer of this blog post is Professor Girish Prayag, Professor of Marketing in the Department of Management, Marketing and Tourism at the UC Business School, Christchurch, New Zealand. He is co-author of the book “Tourism Resilience: Individual, Organizational and Destination Perspectives” published by Channel View. He has published more than 100 articles in leading tourism and marketing journals and is the Editor (Method & Practice) for the journal Current Issues in Tourism and specialty editor for crisis and disaster management and resilience for the new open access journal, Frontiers in Sustainable Tourism.
The Exploring resilience blog discusses the current themes of research, teaching and development of resilience, i.e., crisis resistance and deepens knowledge about the management of global change, and possible solutions to the wicked problems of sustainability. The authors are researchers and experts in the field, and members of the cooperation networks of the University of Oulu’s FRONT PROFI7 research programme.