Beyond the COVID-19 pandemic: what builds organizational resilience capacity?

ABSTRACT

PurposeThe outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has severely disrupted businesses around the world. To address the impact of operational and strategic business disruptions, this paper contributes to the practice of a firm's management in terms of identifying the determinants of organizational resilience (OR) and creating a hierarchical model of the potential sources of a firm's adaptive capability.Design/methodology/approachA novel research framework integrating Pareto analysis, grey theory and total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) has been applied to, first, identify the sources of a company's resilience and, second, to determine contextual relations among these sources of OR.FindingsThe findings of the survey highlight three primary sources that allow companies to build companies' resilience access to financial resources, digitization level and supply chain (SC) collaboration. The authors' model shows that resilience cannot be viewed as a particular feature but rather as a dynamic intertwined network of different co-dependent sources.Research limitations/implicationsThe proposed hierarchical model indicates that the most crucial sources of company's resilience in the recent pandemic are access to financial resources, digitization level and SC collaboration.Originality/valueThe study takes an original investigation on cognitive grounds, touching on the problem of firms' resilience to the unique nature of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also represents one of the few attempts to use integrated Pareto analysis, grey theory and TISM to examine this critical area of firm management.