انعطاف پذیری سازمانی از طریق تعادل ساختارهای سازمانی
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Perspectives on organizational resilience
3- Organizational processes building organizational traits for resilience in previous research
4- An analytical model of organizational resilience
5- Method and case selection
6- Results
7- Analysis: building traits for organizational resilience through balancing organizational structures
8- Conclusion
References
Abstract
This paper describes and explains how balancing organizational structures can build traits for organizational resilience. Organizational resilience is a holistic and complex concept. In this paper, we move beyond focusing on sudden and disruptive events in favour of anticipating the unexpected in daily organizing. Organizational resilience is understood here as building traits of risk awareness, preference for cooperation, agility and improvisation and is analysed by means of a longitudinal qualitative case study. The paper contributes to the field by showing how balancing organizational structures can foster organizational resilience traits. We show that power distribution and normative control can create preparedness for unexpected events and foster action orientation at the same time as supporting organizational alignment.
Introduction
Organizational resilience is a new and growing concept in management research that focuses on maintaining organizational viability in times of disruptive change and transformation (e.g., Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003; Sheffi, 2005; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2011; Välikangas, 2010; Hollnagel, Paries, David, & Wreathall, 2011; Zolli & Healy, 2012; Kayes, 2015; Linnenluecke, 2017; Tengblad & Oudhuis, 2018). Organizational resilience research acknowledges the complexity and unpredictability of business activities and therefore the need for an adaptive and holistic approach to management. However, although the approach is theoretically sound and makes sense to experienced business leaders, organizational resilience is a difficult concept to describe empirically due to this holistic and complex character (Lengnick-Hall, Beck, & Lengnick-Hall, 2011). This could also explain why organizational resilience is conceptualized quite differently in different studies (Linnenluecke, 2017). Many factors influence organizational resilience simultaneously, and in different and often competing ways. The great majority of organizational resilience research reduces this empirical complexity by narrowing the focus to an organization’s capacity to deal with a certain disruption (Linnenluecke, 2017). Because disasters and other unexpected events are analysed retrospectively (e.g., Coutu, 2002; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2011; Tengblad & Oudhuis, 2018), there is limited knowledge on how organizational resilience is maintained in daily processes (without disasters) or how organizational resilience is maintained over time. Moreover, the focus has mainly been on actions undertaken after an unexpected event has occurred; that is, “how the crisis is dealt with”. This focus is understandable for practical reasons (it is easier to study processes that have happened than those that have not yet happened and might not happen at all), but it is not understandable in terms of importance. For example, Weick and Sutcliffe (2011) pointed out that organizational resilience is at least as much about anticipating as containing a crisis, despite the fact that containing is the main focus of most of the organizational resilience research (Linnenluecke, 2017). Anticipation includes avoiding the unexpected to happen by sensing early events, and also efforts to stop the development of undesirable events (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2011).