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Abstract Under the “new normal” that is full of changes and uncertainty, firms’ pursuit of stable development and sustainable operations is increasingly facing formidable challenges. To better understand how firms can withstand shocks and achieve growth in such a turbulent environment, this paper focuses on organizational resilience. Since resilience research involves different disciplines, although it has developed for decades in the field of organization and management, existing literature still fails in reaching a consensus on some basic theoretical issues, such as conceptual dimensions and emergence mechanisms. To advance further research in this domain, this paper, based on a systematic review of 146 articles on organizational resilience within the field of organization and management, provides a clear definition of organizational resilience and distinguishes it from similar concepts to better grasp the unique connotation of this concept. Our systematic review reveals that research on organizational resilience in different disciplines has led to diverse understandings of its essence. Building upon resilience research in ecology and psychology, this paper defines organizational resilience as “the inherent or learned ability of a firm to absorb, respond to, and recover from the internal and external shocks or disruptions, and even to transform them into new growth opportunities”. In addition, this paper analyzes the development trajectory and major theoretical perspectives of resilience research, showing the differences and associations among perspectives from ecology, psychology, sociology, and management within the field of organizational resilience research. Furthermore, this paper explores the influencing factors and mechanisms of organizational resilience at three levels: individual, group, and organization. It emphasizes that the construction of cognitive framework and organization atmosphere constitute important pathways through which individual-level and group-level factors can directly or indirectly impact the organization. Information and knowledge sharing also play an indispensable role in fostering organizational resilience. Incorporating the contingency factors of the emergence of organizational resilience, this paper establishes a cross-level integrated analysis model for organizational resilience research in an attempt to reveal the formation and emergence mechanism of organizational resilience. Finally, this paper suggests possible directions for future research from four aspects: time frame, measurement, cross-level interactions, and contingency factors. This paper makes three contributions to the literature. Firstly, integrating the theories in ecology and psychology, this paper clearly defines the connotation of organizational resilience and points out that organizational resilience includes three core elements: survival, recovery, and growth, laying a theoretical foundation for the subsequent development of accurate measurement tools for organizational resilience. Secondly, this paper analyzes the development and theoretical perspective of organizational resilience research and sketches a relatively complete theoretical map, which helps enhance the overall understanding of the theoretical progress of organizational resilience research. Thirdly, this paper investigates the influencing factors and mechanisms of organizational resilience at the individual, group, and organization levels, and establishes a cross-level linking mechanism, which provides an analytical framework for systematically understanding the micro-foundation and emerging mechanism of organizational resilience as well as a cognitive framework for bridging the gap between current theory and practice.
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Published: 21 February 2024
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