Inside the Onion: Understanding What Enhances and Inhibits Organizational Resilience

Abstract

Organizational resilience refers to an organizations’ capacity to withstand changes over time. Most existing models of organizational resilience have not been empirically tested and/or tend to focus on “what resilience is” and little attempt has been made to investigate factors that enhance and/or diminish an organization’s resilience. This qualitative research study, therefore, seeks to advance theorizing about organizational resilience by identifying and exploring both the enablers and inhibitors of organizational resilience. Longitudinal interview data are analyzed to explore employees’ perceptions about what has impacted their organization’s ability to cope with change. A conceptual model of organizational resilience is proposed. The contributions of this model are that it is the first, to our knowledge, to (1) propose a multilevel conceptualization of organizational resilience, and (2) include within the model the idea that earlier changes can both enhance and inhibit the organizations’ current ability to cope with change.

Keywords

resilience organizational change emic qualitative

Researchers have been investigating organizational change formally for more than 100 years (Burnes, 2004) and managing change has increasingly become a day-to-day reality for managers and employees alike (Burnes & Cooke, 2012). This would imply that research that helps us understand how organizations cope with and/or thrive amid continual change is likely to add value to both the practice and study of organizational change.

So how do organizations cope with and/or thrive amid change over time? To address this question, we turn to research on organizational resilience. Organizational resilience is defined as an organization’s capacity to “adjust organizational processes under challenging conditions . . . to bounce back from untoward events . . . and maintain desirable functions and outcomes in the midst of strain” (Gittell, Cameron, Lim, & Rivas, 2006, p. 303). Organizations with high levels of resilience are believed to be better able to cope with environmental turbulence and organizational change (Lengnick-Hall, Beck, & Lengnick-Hall, 2011). Both the practitioner and scholarly literatures on resilience share the common view that organizational resilience is linked to an organization’s ability to “weather the storm” and successfully endure organization changes that are needed to remain competitive (Aleksić, Stefanović, Arsovski, & Tadić, 2013; Coutu, 2002; Hamel & Valikangas, 2003; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011). Despite the increasing popularity of the term “organizational resilience” and the relevance of this construct to managers and practitioners seeking to implement change, most of the existing work in the area is conceptual in nature (Bhamra, Dani, & Burnard, 2011). The few empirical studies that have focused on organizational resilience tend to be descriptive focusing primarily on understanding what organizational resilience is (Bhamra et al., 2011). Very little empirical research has been done identifying and exploring factors that may be responsible for enhancing and/or diminishing an organization’s resilience. This is unfortunate as such information is important to those working in the area of change management.

This article addresses these gaps in our understanding by undertaking a longitudinal inductive qualitative research study designed to help us better understand employees’ perceptions of factors that enhance and/or diminish organizational resilience during periods of extensive change. Findings from this study should provide change theoreticians and practitioners with a more comprehensive understanding of the elements of organizational resilience.

This article is structured as follows. We begin with a review of the literature to familiarize the reader with the current empirical work on organizational resilience. After describing the research objective motivating this study we provide key methodological details on how the study was done, including a description of the organization that is examined in this case as well as the changes it has undergone. Key findings are then presented followed by a discussion section which links findings to the extant literature in the area and includes relevant implications for researchers and practitioners.

Literature Review

Conceptualizing Organizational Resilience

The organizational resilience concept initially gained popularity within the anecdotal practitioner literatures about organizational change and strategy (e.g., Coutu, 2002; Hamel & Valikangas, 2003). More recently, management researchers have accorded more attention to the empirical investigation of organizational resilience (e.g., Lee, Vargo, & Seville, 2013; Pal, Torstensson, & Mattila, 2014) and the development of conceptual models of organizational level resilience. A comprehensive search of the extant literature in the area resulted in the identification of six articles describing the major models of organizational resilience cited in the management literature. Information on these models are summarized in Table 1. For each model in the table we delineate whether the researchers conceptualize resilience from a psychological (i.e., a resilient organization is comprised of resilient employees) or ecological (i.e., organizational resilience is a system’s adaptation mechanism) stance, identify whether the model has been empirically tested, and identify how the construct is conceptualized.

Table 1.

Organizational Resilience Models From the Literature.

Name	Authors	Psychology or ecology based	Empirical tested or purely conceptual	Resilience conceptualized as:
Conceptual model of organizational resilience	Gittell et al. (2006)	Ecology	Empirical: Sample = 10 U.S. airlines	1. Relational reserves2. Financial reserves3. Business model viability
Organizational capacity for resilience factors	Lengnick-Hall et al. (2011)	Psychology	Conceptual	1. Cognitive (values, vision)2. Behavioral (resourcefulness, agility)3. Contextual (relationships and access to resources)


Sources of resilience	Mallak (1998)	Psychology	Empirical: Sample = 128 nursing executives	1. Goal-directed solution seeking
				2. Avoidance
				3. Critical understanding
				4. Role dependence
				5. Source resilience
				6. Resource access
Factors of relative overall resilience	Lee et al. (2013)	Ecology	Empirical: Sample = 249 people at 68 different New Zealand organizations	1. Situational awareness
				2. Management of keystone vulnerabilities
				3. Adaptive capacity
Resilience enablers	Pal et al. (2014)	Ecology	Empirical: Sample = 8 Swedish textile SMEs	1. Material/systems
				2. Finance
				3. Social
				4. Network
				5. Goodwill
Characteristics of resilient systems	Bhamra et al. (2011)	Ecology	Conceptual	1. Diversity2. Efficiency3. Adaptability4. Cohesion

Note. SMEs = small- to medium-sized enterprises.

Many of these models focus on theoretically articulating “what organizational resilience is.” For example, the models presented by Gittell et al. (2006), Lengnick-Hall et al. (2011), Lee et al. (2013) and Bhamra et al. (2011) all identify between three and four key factors, facets, or characteristics of organizational resilience. Some models go one step further and identify sources (Mallak, 1998) or enablers (Pal et al., 2014) of organizational resilience. Of relevance to this study is the fact that, with one exception (Pal et al., 2014), none of the work in this domain has explicitly considered inhibitors, or factors that may diminish an organization’s resilience. While Pal et al.’s (2014) analysis considered both enablers and inhibitors of organizational resilience, their main focus was on enablers of economic resilience for Swedish textile enterprises throughout a period of financial crisis and may not be generalizable.

Our review of the existing work on this topic also uncovered several properties of organizational resilience that may have relevance to our study. First, we note that several researchers conceptualize resilience as a continuous variable and posit that all organizations have a capacity or potential for resilience (Aleksić et al., 2013; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011). If this is in fact the case, then it is important for researchers and practitioners to understand the mechanisms they can use to enhance resilience in times of change. Second, some of the literature suggests that organizational resilience is not static but rather can be developed or grown over time (Bonanno, 2005). Our study will provide information on how this growth could perhaps be managed. Third, organizational resilience may be modeled as a multilevel construct. This contention is supported by the fact that existing research in the area implicitly or explicitly assumes that system and subsystem levels (e.g., individual, unit, organization, organizational population/field, community) of resilience are related (Lee et al., 2013; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011). We build on this idea in this article by being open to the idea that organizational resilience is a multilevel construct.

Methodological Approaches Used to Study Organizational Resilience

Etic approaches (i.e., from the perspective of the researcher) were used to develop and test all the empirically validated models of organizational resilience identified in our search of the literature (i.e., Gittell et al., 2006; Mallak, 1998; Lee et al., 2013; Pal et al., 2014). Gittell et al. (2006), for example, took a positivist approach to the topic and used the resource view of the firm to propose a model for resilience, which they then tested by examining the impact of pre-9/11 business models and financial reserves on post-9/11 stock price recovery for 10 U.S. airlines. Mallak (1998), on the other hand, reviewed the psychology literature and identified items he felt should be included in his measure of individual (not organizational) “sources of resilience.” He then tested the measure using confirmatory factor analysis with a sample of 128 nursing executives. Lee et al. (2013) also used an etic research methodology to develop their measure of resilience. In this case, however, the focus was on community responses to natural disasters and it was this literature that was consulted during the item generation phase of this research. Lee and colleagues quantitatively tested their model of resilience by surveying 249 individuals working for 68 organizations based in New Zealand. Finally, Pal et al. (2014) proposed a model for resilient small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) based on a mixed method study of 8 Swedish textile organizations that had undergone a financial crisis. While Pal et al.’s (2014) study included qualitative data, their approach was etic in that it focused on identifying the extent to which the qualitative and quantitative data fit the resilient SME model that the authors’ constructed based on the SME literature.

Research Objective

The primary objective of this study is to advance theorizing about organizational resilience by identifying and exploring both the enablers and inhibitors of organizational resilience. This objective is facilitated through the use of an inductive qualitative case study approach that involves grounded theory data analysis techniques.

As noted above, the empirically tested models of organizational resilience look at the construct from a positivist, etic (i.e., researcher centric) perspective. While such an approach has many known benefits (e.g., builds on prior research and theory, establishes ways to quantify a phenomena of interest) it also has its limitations. As Zhu and Bargiela-Chiappini (2013) point out:

the etic approach only provides a starting point for analysis, which needs complementing by an in-depth emic perspective, with its detailed accounts of how insiders’ understand their own practices, how they perceive and categorize the world, what has meaning for them, and how they explain things. (p. 382)

Zero of the models of organizational resilience identified in our search of the literature explicitly sought to ground their research in the subject’s views, or to understand the organizational members’ interpretation of resilience (i.e., an emic view of the concept). Given the relative newness of theory on organizational resilience and the broader critique of etic-ly focused research on organizational change (Klarner, By, & Diefenbach, 2011; Oswick, Grant, Michelson, & Wailes, 2005), it follows that a more comprehensive understanding of the elements of organizational resilience could be attained through research that attempts to uncover how organizational members who have been exposed to change view organizational resilience.

Methodology

This qualitative study uses social constructivist grounded theory data analysis techniques proposed by Charmaz (2006) and Gioia, Corley, and Hamilton (2013) to explore how organizational members conceptualize organizational resilience. The case organization is Community Hospital. Interview data were collected from 39 individuals employed by the hospital throughout the duration of a recent large scale change initiative. Details on the case organization, data collection, and data analysis procedures are provided in the following sections.

Community Hospital (Case Organization)

When designing our study, we followed recommendations from Gioia et al. (2013) and selected an extreme or unique case of the phenomena of interest (an organization that had recently undergone a period of substantial change) where data were available regarding organizational members’ perceptions of organizational resilience. Community Hospital met these criteria.

Community Hospital is a 63-bed hospital located in a small town (population = 2,500) in eastern Ontario, Canada, which is about a 1-hour drive away from a larger urban center (population = 900,000). The hospital serves the residents of this small town and the neighboring towns in the rural farming region. It is a key employer for the region and currently employs about 340 individuals. The hospital offers inpatient, outpatient, and diagnostic imaging and laboratory services.

Community Hospital has endured various pressures for change over the past 10 years including (1) demographic shifts that are anticipated to alter both the supply and demand for health care (Statistics Canada, 2012), (2) the implementation of new technologies that affect how care is provided, (3) changing funding structures and governance mechanisms, (4) the introduction of patient-centered care delivery models, and (5) high turnover among leaders at the provincial and federal levels.

In response to these external pressures for organizational change, the hospital initiated a period of major change that lasted about 10 years. Many changes took place as part of this initiative such as the construction of and move to a new facility, leadership turnover (including CEO succession) and a variety of other strategic changes that were implemented as part of ensuring the hospital’s long-term survival. Figure 1 outlines some of the key changes that took place at the hospital from 2009 through 2013 (the time-period that this study focuses on). Details on the changes included in the figure are provided in the following text.

Before 2009

The decade of organizational change kicked off with the “vision” fundraising campaign, which was launched in 2002 in order to raise money to build a new hospital. In 2004, a new CEO was hired by Community Hospital’s board of directors in order to lead the organization through the major changes. The CEO was an external hire who had begun her career as a nurse but more recently had experience serving in administrative roles. Community Hospital was the first time she had served as a CEO for an organization. Between 2004 and 2007 she made a number of changes to the Senior Management team at the hospital. More specifically, she hired five new individuals to serve on the small team of eight.

2009

In March 2009, the new hospital officially opened (i.e., “the move”). Although Community Hospital was outperforming its peers on benchmarks including patient satisfaction and overhead cost per case, the CEO was concerned about morale at the hospital. A 2009 survey, carried out by a third-party group, had found low job satisfaction among organizational members. These survey findings led the CEO to contact the authors and ask them to conduct a more detailed “staff satisfaction” study at Community Hospital.

2010-2011

Throughout 2010 the board of directors encouraged the CEO to retire, which she did in June of 2011 (i.e., “CEO retires”). Prior to the retirement, she had launched a new vision for the hospital, that the organization “would be a Centre of Excellence for Rural Health and Education in Ontario” (i.e., “Center for Excellence announced”). As part of this vision, several partnerships with local and regional health care providers were formed. For example, in 2010 the hospital began the acquisition of a nearby long-term care facility (i.e., “long term care facility acquisition”). Next in early 2011, the hospital signed an agreement to merge with a much larger urban hospital (i.e., “merger with urban hospital”).

The selection process for the new CEO occurred over the summer of 2011 and in September 2011 the new CEO started (i.e., “new CEO”). This new CEO was again an external hire. Although he did not have a clinical background he did have prior experience as a CEO at similarly sized hospitals. At the time of his hire, the new CEO was responsible for completing the Centre for Excellence plans envisioned by the former CEO and implementing additional initiatives to improve relationships at the hospital.

2012-2013

The pace of change at Community Hospital did not wane with the hiring of the new CEO. Some changes implemented by the new CEO in 2012 were changes to work processes in order to strengthen the organizational culture such as the introduction of unit councils for nursing staff (i.e., “unit councils started”), team huddles in all departments (i.e., “team huddles begin”) and new technologies (i.e., “Electronic Health Records”).

In 2013, there were even more changes. For instance, partnerships were made with other health care organizations who leased space in a building constructed next to the hospital (i.e., “community partners move in”) and LEAN was implemented in the emergency department (i.e., “LEAN introduced”). Shortly after the implementation of LEAN, in September of 2013, the new CEO announced that the hospital would need to make changes in response to the low patient volumes in many departments (i.e., “CEO announces need for change due to low patient volumes”). At the time, the CEO did not specifically address how these changes would be implemented or what form they would take.

Data Collection

The data analyzed in this article come from a government funded longitudinal study into change within the health care sector. This study involved the collection of various types of data (i.e., surveys, interviews, focus groups and observations) at multiple points in time (2009-2013). Two organization-wide surveys were undertaken by the authors at the hospital in 2009 and 2012. About half (i.e., 51% or n = 173/340) of the staff at Community Hospital completed the 2012 survey. At the end of the 2012 survey, respondents were asked to provide their name and contact information if they were willing to participate in a follow-up interview. The authors used this information to contact the interested survey respondents and arrange for follow-up interviews, which were audio recorded and transcribed. Overall, 59 employees (34% of survey respondents) participated in a follow-up interview in 2012. In 2013, we contacted each of the 59 people who participated in the 2012 interviews to seek their participation in one final interview. In total, 39 of the 59 individuals who were interviewed in 2012 agreed to partake in the 2013 interview. The sample distributions (n = 39) with respect to gender (77% female) and job type (10% manager, 23% physician, 28% nurse, 13% clinical support, and 26% nonclinical support) were reflective of the hospital’s workforce and the 2012 interview sample. Responses from these 39 employees to the final interview done in 2013 provide the core data analyzed in this study.

The interview participants were given the choice between an in person or telephone interview. Almost all the interviewees choose the in-person interview option, which involved being interviewed in person, on site at a private room in the hospital. The first author of this article conducted these interviews. Interviews ranged from 20 to 65 minutes with the average interview taking about 35 minutes. The interviewer used a semistructured pilot tested script that included questions about employees’ backgrounds, general work experiences, the work environment at the hospital and organizational changes at the hospital.

The core data used in this analysis come specifically from the part of the interview that focused on organizational change and organizational resilience. To understand how the informants conceptualized organizational resilience, we asked them the following two questions (1) “As an organization, this hospital has faced many changes over the years. In your opinion, what factors may have enhanced Community Hospital’s ability to deal with change?” and (2) “What factors may have diminished Community Hospital’s ability to deal with change?” The interviewer asked additional question to clarify informant’s responses as needed (e.g., Can you explain more?). The transcribed responses to the organizational resilience questions (listed above) total 29 pages single-spaced. Informants’ responses to these questions provided a starting point for understanding their perceptions of the traits, characteristics and other phenomena that they perceived as being related to their organization’s ability to endure change over time.

Data Analysis

QSR-Nvivo Version 10, a software that facilitates qualitative data analysis, was used to sort and code our data (i.e., assign labels to pieces of text from the transcriptions). The consequent analysis of the data involved two phases. The first phase focused on responses to the 2013 interview questions about organizational resilience whereas the second phase considered the interview data more broadly (i.e., responses to other questions from 2013, 2009, and 2012). In both phases, the first author performed initial coding, at which point results were discussed with the second author and adjustments made as needed until both authors came to agreement. The subsequent coding was also a collaborative process between the two authors.

Phase 1: Perceptions of What Enhances and/or Diminishes Organizational Resilience

Incident-to-incident coding (Charmaz, 2006) was used to analyze informants’ responses to the two interview questions about organizational resilience. We created and assigned labels (i.e., codes) to summarize themes in informants’ responses. The codes were emergent (i.e., not predetermined based on the literature or theory). Constant comparison was also utilized and whenever a new code was created the coded responses were rechecked to identify links to existing codes (Charmaz, 2006).

This coding process involved three stages. First, during “initial coding,” we coded responses according to themes that were as close as possible to what the interviewee had said (i.e., using their words when possible; Charmaz, 2006). During initial coding, there were 24 codes created to describe individuals’ perceptions of factors that enhanced the organization’s ability to deal with change and 32 codes created to describe perceptions of factors that diminished the organization’s ability to deal with change. Second, during “focused coding,” we grouped the most salient (i.e., commonly mentioned) initial codes into broader and more abstract categories (Charmaz, 2006). In total, 8 focused codes were created to reflect the underlying categories related to what individuals viewed as responsible for enhancing and diminishing the organization’s ability to deal with change. Three of the eight focused codes were the same as initial codes and further abstraction (in these instances) was deemed unnecessary. The third stage of analysis involved the identification of four overarching themes in the responses. It was at this point that the eight focused codes were each assigned to one of the four broader themes identified (details of which are described in the following sections). More detailed information on the initial and focused codes is available from the authors on request.

Phase 2: Supplementary Analysis

After the preliminary analysis (described above) was complete, to “capture the lived” reality of change, we elected to reread the rest of our interview data, including interview transcripts from 2009, 2012 and the entirety of interview transcripts from 2013. This process was important for triangulation (Myers, 2009), a practice used to confirm findings from different sources of data. In this instance, we sought to triangulate findings from the respondent’s answers about the factors that enhanced and or diminished organizational resilience with their descriptions of organizational change(s) that were provided when not prompted about organizational resilience. First, we coded for any instance in which informants mentioned organizational change. This resulted in 61 additional pages of single spaced text. Next, we performed initial and focused coding (Charmaz, 2006) on these incidents (detailed results available from authors on request) and we compared these results with the factors that were identified by informants as either enhancers or inhibitors of organizational resilience. This supplementary analysis allowed us to identify “organizational resilience stories” that illustrate many of the themes that emerged in the preliminary stage of analysis.

Findings

Key findings from these two phases of analysis (i.e., analysis of responses to resilience interview questions and supplementary analysis of all interview data) are presented sequentially below.

Perceptions of What Enhances and/or Diminishes Organizational Resilience

Table 2 represents the data structure that resulted from the analysis of the responses to the 2013 questions about organizational resilience. The table shows how the more commonly mentioned initial codes (in the Initial Code column) were aggregated into the focused coding categories (in the second column) and into higher level themes (in the first column). The (+), (−) and (+/−) symbols next to each of the initial codes in Table 2 refer to whether the initial code represents a factor that was viewed by interviewees as enhancing (+), inhibiting (−) or both enhancing and inhibiting (+/−) Community Hospital’s ability to cope with change over the years. Findings are described from highest to lowest level of analysis and abstraction (i.e., theme → initial code), although the actual data analysis procedures (described above) involved analysis from lowest to highest levels of abstraction (i.e., initial code → theme). In the text that follows, focused codes are represented with bold font, initial codes with bold and italicized font, and interviewee quotes are indicated by italicized font.

Table 2.

Resulting Data Structure.

Theme	Focused code	Initial code^a	Sample quote
People	Leadership/Management	CEO (+) (− from stories)	“The change in the main leader . . . I respected [the old CEO] but she was a manager or management-type person. I think the change to the [new CEO] has helped us all deal with change better.”
		Management style (−)	“When [managers] don’t go through with what they’ve promised . . . you go up to your manager and you ask and you don’t hear back, then that’s that.
	Staff	New staff (+/−)	“New guys!; We have brought in all new IT people . . . which is nice.”
		Unhappy people (−)	“I can just remember when the new hospital was built and everybody moved over, there was a lot of negativity.”
		Committed people (+)	“It’s the commitment of the people in the organization. This is their hospital . . . they’re people that are invested in the organization.”
		Flexible people (+)	“It’s the people who make the difference . . . they are easy for change. You can point to one or two employees in the organization that you feel they will be resistant to change, but the rest are adaptive.”
	Organizational culture	Small size (+)	“The fact that it’s a smaller hospital probably helps, which means you don’t have a big machine you have to change every time you want to institute a new policy or procedure.”
		Community oriented (+/−)	“Whatever the change is, we want to make it work because we’re passionate about the place and it’s our family that’s being served here so you just have the heart for it.”
Organizational context for change	Change management	Change leadership (+/−)	“I don’t think there would have been as many problems dealing with some of the changes had it not been dictated . . . even if the end result is what you wanted in the beginning, at least they were allowed to participate.”
	processes	Pace of change (−)	“Too much at once.; The huge amount of change is happening all at once.”
	Specific changes	New building (+)	“The new building made a big difference because people were in the mind-set that this is a new building, new processes, new lots of things. And a lot of the old ways couldn’t work in the new physical space.”
		New CEO (+)	“I think having a new CEO and having a new hospital has really made a big difference.; A better fit in terms of CEO than we had before.”
Organizational processes	Communication	Communication (+)	“They’ve instituted email finally for all the staff . . . I think that has helped.; “The level of communication. We’ve had more huddles . . . The pulse was introduced, which is our communication in the newspaper. The transparency, when it comes to minutes from different committees.”
Organizational processes	New work processes	New work processes (+)	“The nurses are moving around more too . . . going from department to department. When someone is needed, they pull someone from here and put them over here, and then they get to see what’s going on in every other department.”
External environment	Financial constraints	Budget (−)	“Recently we were told that we’re in a deficit year, so we have possibly less funding.”

The (+), (−) and (+/−) symbols next to each initial code refers to whether the code represents a factor that was viewed by interviewees as enhancing (+), inhibiting (−) or both enhancing and inhibiting (+/−) the organization’s ability to cope with change (i.e., organizational resilience).

At the most abstract (i.e., highest) level of analysis, informants’ perceptions of the factors that enhanced and/or diminished resilience at Community Hospital could be grouped into four themes (see the left most column of the Table 2): “people,” “organizational context for change,” “organizational processes,” and “external environment.” Each theme and its corresponding focused codes are described in more detail below.

The “people” theme reflects the responses provided by interviewees that attributed Community Hospital’s ability to cope with excessive change over the years to the organization’s leadership/management, staff and/or organizational culture. In other words, they equated how the organization treated their people with enhanced or diminished levels of the organization’s resilience.

Informant’s comments suggest while the behavior of top leaders might increase organizational resilience, this can be offset by the day to day behavior of an organization’s management team. Analysis showed, for example, that the new CEO was cited as someone that has enhanced the hospital’s ability to cope with change: “The CEO seems to be able to get along well with people and is open to change almost anytime, so I think that’s helped.” Management style , on the other hand, was most often mentioned as something that had inhibited the hospital’s ability to cope with change: “I think it’s a management style thing, and if you’ve got leaders in positions that will not listen and make authoritative decisions, I don’t think you’re ever going to have positive change.”

According to our informants, the attitudes of the people who work for the organization also have substantive impact on the organization’s ability to weather change. Respondents talked about how having unhappy people within the organization diminished the organization’s ability to deal with change: “the people who are not happy are the ones who are always not happy and not willing to work towards solutions . . . it’s more an individualized personality issue as opposed to an organizational issue.” Conversely, employees felt that an influx of new staff (e.g., “The new people that are brought in”), as well as a high number of committed people (e.g., “There’s a lot of people here who have worked here a long time and they want to maintain a good reputation so they will change”) and flexible people (e.g., “we’re all quite flexible . . . people just seem to make it work”) working within the organization all enhanced the organization’s ability to deal with change and hence increased organizational resilience.

Organizational culture was also mentioned as both an inhibitor and enhancer of Community Hospital’s resilience. Interviewees viewed the small size of the organization as contributing to an organizational culture that copes well with change. In the words of one interviewee: “Since it’s a smaller organization it . . . deals with change in a way that might not be possible in a bigger organization where, maybe, things can get lost or overlooked.” Others described the culture as community focused and noted that this focus both helped and hurt the organizations’ resilience. One interviewee described the community culture as a facilitator of resilience: “we’re a community hospital and I feel a lot of our community people are involved in the hospital. And I think that’s the one thing that makes us stand out more than any other hospital.” While another felt that the community ties contributed to resistance to change and hence could be considered an inhibitor of resilience at Community Hospital: “there’s a little bit of a small town mentality in terms of: the way we do things is fine.”

The second theme, “organizational context for change,” linked perceptions of resilience to how the changes within the hospital had been managed over time. Responses grouped within the change management processes theme were mentioned as both an enhancer and inhibitor of resilience at Community Hospital. While change leadership was viewed as positively related to Community Hospital’s resilience by some (e.g., “I would have to say management in regards to the over and above that they do to try to get people to be onboard”), others gave examples of how the change was being led as negatively impacting the hospital’s resilience (e.g., “there were significant impediments in the communication or leadership process, in terms of how stuff would be rolled out and how people were being engaged.”). The sheer pace of change was also cited as something that employees’ perceived as having a negative impact on the organization’s ability to deal with change over time: “I think simply the volume of change that they’re pushing for.”

Two specific changes that had taken place at the hospital over the years were also mentioned as things that enhanced the organization’s ability to deal with change. These specific changes include the new building and the new CEO , both of which were viewed as facilitating the organization’s ability to cope with additional change. According to one interviewee: “Moving to a new hospital is maybe a bit of a catalyst for change, a symbol of change and then everybody sort of understands maybe we need to change.” Another interviewee explained: “I think the change in the main leader . . . the new CEO has helped us all deal with change better.”

All responses included within the third theme, “organizational processes,” described mechanisms that enhanced organizational resilience. People talked, for example, about the importance of group communication processes during times of change: “They’ve started doing what they call huddles in the departments every morning . . . I think it has contributed in a way because it’s a communication thing. In change, you need communication.” Other new work processes at the hospital were also mentioned by some as facilitators of the hospital’s resilience: “Putting processes in place to deal with issues . . . before they become snowballs.”

All responses coded into the fourth (and final), theme, the “external environment” described external factors which diminished Community Hospital’s ability to cope with change. Virtually everyone who mentioned this factor spoke about how externally imposed budgets and financial constraints related to the publicly funded nature of health care in Canada made the hospital less resilient and able to cope with change: “Provincial budgets are always tighter and I guess there’s less leeway to deal with upcoming problems we have.”

Stories About Organizational Resilience at Community Hospital

This subsection of the article presents results from the supplementary analysis. This analysis involved reviewing responses to all the questions asked in the total set of interviews (i.e., 2009, 2012 and 2013), not just those questions where informants were directly asked about organizational resilience. These results are in a narrative format (Myers, 2009) and, therefore, we call them “stories” of organizational resilience at Community Hospital. In total, six stories are presented to illustrate how the findings from analysis of the 2013 data compare and contrast with analysis of the complete set of interview data. The stories we selected for presentation in this article exemplify the most common themes and patterns that emerged during supplementary analysis. Other “stories” are available from the authors on request.¹

Story 1: It’s All About the People (and Place)

Lisa (pseudonym) was an administrative assistant that was relatively new to the hospital when the move to the new building occurred. In her 2009 interview, when discussing how the organization is coping with the move to the new building, she offered some interesting insights. Her story, which is provided below, connects the organization’s ability to deal with change to the management style and/or change management processes at the hospital while also noting the impact of place (i.e., the rural location of the hospital) and flexible people on resilience:

“I think I’m a little bit more open to change because my husband and I lived on a farm—he grew up in a farming community and when I started dating him it was a case of do I have a date tonight or not? Ok, if he shows up, we have a date and if not, oh well, because the land comes first. So, I’ve always been very flexible with my time. And then doing temp work, you adapt. So, if things change, it doesn’t really affect me. I will say, ok, that’s cool, we’re going to go onto something new; we’ll see how that works. Sometimes you make the changes and it really isn’t worth it, but for the most part, around here, people take change as managers make me do it and they don’t want to do it just because management says. And management around here, if you take a look at them, nobody above me, apart from the admin assistant . . . we all live within ten to fifteen minutes of here. All other management live in [the nearby city] and elsewhere. They’re not from around here.”

Story 2: Shifting From New Hospital to New CEO

Paul (pseudonym) is an administrative clerk at Community Hospital. He also started working at Community Hospital shortly before the move to the new building. This story, from his 2012 interview, describes how the organization’s ability to adapt has shifted over time. He speaks to two large specific changes at the hospital; the new CEO and the move to the new building . His story links the role of the CEO (i.e., “people”) as well as the ‘organizational context for change’ and flexible people to organizational resilience:

“It’s better now than it used to be; the new CEO has been a huge benefit. He’s really come in and shook the whole place up but it was what we needed. And his focus is on making staff happy, making sure they’re supported and not as much so for the managers; he’s really here for staff and staff really appreciated that; at least that’s what I’ve noticed. Like when we moved into the new building, changes all over the place and we didn’t know we were coming or going, but we seemed to have settled into a groove now and now the focus is back on the staff where it really needs to be. And he’s done some good things so far, so it’s improved but there’s just people that don’t handle well and others that do. So we still have that in the mix.”

Story 3: Lack of Timely Communication

This story comes from a 2013 interview with Cheryl (pseudonym), a nurse that has worked at Community Hospital for well over a decade. This story discusses a prior change management effort at Community Hospital and illustrates how the lack of timely communication around change may have acted as an inhibitor to organizational resilience:

“I think in retrospect, the biggest thing they could have done to make (change management) better is to show us the respect of informing us ahead of time, ok on Monday or a week from today, this is what we’re going to do and it’s going to happen in stages. There was very very little communication. It’s like they sprung it on us on a Monday morning. We knew it was happening but no one communicated when, how or anything until the Monday morning and we walked in and here you go – this is what we’re doing now. I was just totally disgusted.”

Stories 4 and 5: Team V: Expectation Versus Reality

In several of the 2012 and 2013 interviews nurses and managers talked about “Team V” and the introduction of unit councils. The data indicated that these changes were intended to improve organizational culture, communication and organizational processes thereby acting as an enabler of organizational resistance. Interestingly, this initiative was funded by the government, which means these stories bridge the “organizational processes” and “external environment” themes while also characterizing the “external environment” as an enabler of organizational resilience when funding is made available to facilitate change.

Story 4 comes from a 2012 interview with Sally (pseudonym), a senior nurse manager that has been with Community Hospital for about 7 years:

“You know the one thing that I think has been really positive that I think is really going to make a big difference with the change in culture within the organization is what they call the V team formation, which is an initiative that came out of money that was given to us from the ministry . . . so there was this collaboration of [nurses] and nursing staff looking at the healthy work environment from the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario’s Best Practice for healthy work environments . . . So what they did is they went through all of the different things and they identified what they felt the nursing staff themselves, people from every single department, what they felt would be high priority items. And so they have short term and long term goals as to what they want to do, but with the thought that what they would like to do is develop unit action councils, but to be successful in doing this we need to support this. This, I think, is a high priority initiative to keep that going, but getting the resources and the commitment to do that-we just need to make sure it’s there because I think this in itself is bringing everybody together.”

The next story about the unit councils comes from a 2013 interview with Susan (pseudonym). Susan is a nurse in an informal leadership position within one of the clinical units. She is a “veteran employee” that has worked for Community Hospital for over 20 years. In her story she reflects on how the unit council initiative has played out in reality over the last year (i.e., since Sally’s story above):

“We have another meeting coming up next week and are formally presenting the issues. They have put in place these unit council meetings for us to solve it ourselves. But at the same time we have no power or authority to change anything so it’s redundant and it’s just made it like ok, so now you’ve got us talking among ourselves but we have nothing . . . we can’t do anything. Every time we present something they’ll say, no, can’t be done. Go back to your unit and figure out something else . . . We’ve only had a couple [unit council meetings] and they’re poorly attended . . . we had a separate meeting offsite that had probably 94% of the staff there. And it was very interesting to talk in that meeting because all the issues that my team is having, all the other teams are having the exact same issues.”

Story 6: The System Is Broken

Not surprisingly, a number of interviewees expressed frustration with how the federal and/or provincial health care system is being managed. These descriptions seemed to paint the Ministry and other key players in the hospital’s “external environment” as barriers to effective change and/or organizational resilience. One of the more impassioned accounts of this comes from a 2013 interview with Matthew (pseudonym), a physician that has worked with Community Hospital for about 12 years:

“It’s been absolutely horrid with the [current provincial] government . . . it’s the Ministry of Health. I don’t think they have a clue as to what they’re doing. They think they do: ‘We’ll run it like a business’—well, there has to be a business aspect to healthcare, no doubt about it, but you’re dealing with human beings. You’re dealing with your constituents, the people whose money is going to taxes . . . I was there for many years and seeing it deteriorate, with more and more layers of bureaucracy. More and more money being funded to community health, where it never gets to the patient care because it’s been sucked up by all these increased layers of bureaucracy doing god knows what, because it’s only diminished the quality of care and the amount of care being given to the people who are paying their taxes into the system. It’s absolutely deplorable . . .”

Initially we had hoped to integrate the above “stories” in with the presentation of the preliminary findings in the preceding section. However, this was not possible for two reasons. First, in many of the stories that we identified in the data there was not a clear delineation between the different factors identified in the preliminary analysis. This is because within one story informants typically described a scenario that incorporated multiple initial and/or focused codes and, often, multiple themes (e.g., “people” and “organizational context for change”). Second, in these stories informants often described factors in ways that contradicted how the same factors were identified (i.e., as enhancers or inhibitors or resilience) in preliminary analysis. For example, factors that were identified in the preliminary analysis as inhibitors (e.g., “external environment”) were sometimes presented in these stories as enhancers of the organization’s ability to cope with change. These two findings, we feel, deepened our understanding of the dynamics between and across the factors that enhance and/or diminish organizational resilience and are revisited in the proceeding discussion.

Discussion

The discussion of how findings from this study relate to the existing work on organizational resilience is divided into two parts as follows. First, a model of organizational resilience (Figure 2), which is inspired by key findings from this study, is proposed. Next, the model is compared to existing models of organizational resilience. The discussion section ends by presenting the limitations of this study and describing both the implications for research and practice.

Modeling the Insider View of Organizational Resilience

To advance theorizing on organizational resilience we use the findings from this study to construct the model shown in Figure 2, which we feel illustrates the organizational resilience construct. Below we describe the model and outline four propositions for how organizational resilience can be conceptualized.

Proposition 1: Organizational resilience can be conceptualized as a multilevel construct that includes four nested layers: People, organizational context for change, organizational processes, and external environment.

In the diagram in Figure 2, we envision organizational resilience as an onion with four layers that correspond to the four high level themes identified in our analysis of the interview data. We position the three “people” factors identified in our study at the “heart of the onion” as we posit that the people who work for the organization and how they are treated by their employer during times of change as well as periods of “relative calm” are key to organizational resilience. More specifically we link organizational resilience to how employees are led and managed, the values articulated and rewarded by the organization (i.e., culture) and the degree to which individual employees can be considered resilient (i.e., employee commitment, employee flexibility, job satisfaction, organizational tenure). Our findings suggest however, that organizational resilience goes beyond who works for the organization and how they are treated, to also include the “organizational context for change” (how change has been managed in the organization over time), the “organizational processes” in place to support the change (communication processes in particular seem to be inexorably linked to resilience), and factors in the “external environment” such as a lack of funding that make coping with change challenging.

Proposition 2: The boundaries between the layers are permeable.

The style of the line for each of the four circles in Figure 2 is intentionally faint as we hypothesize interaction and permeability between various layers. This representation also reflects the fact that some of the categories that we have placed within a particular layer (e.g., leadership under people) are also related to another layer (e.g., leadership could also be viewed as contributing to the organizational context for change).

Proposition 3: Elements within each layer can act as both enhancers and/or inhibitors of organizational resilience.

While our preliminary findings support the idea that: “organizational processes” act as an enhancer of organizational resilience while the external environment is an inhibitor of resilience, findings from our supplementary analysis suggest that the reverse may also be true. For example, when asked about factors that diminish Community Hospital’s ability to deal with change some informants identified budget constraints imposed by the provincial government as a resilience inhibitor. The supplementary analysis, on the other hand, provided examples where provincial money was allocated to help fund initiatives that could increase the organization’s ability to cope with change. Accordingly, we propose that each of the four layers in our model of organizational resilience could contain both enhancers and/or inhibitors of organizational resilience depending on the organizational and situational context.

Proposition 4: The overall level of organizational resilience is a function of all four of the layers of the model.

Although we posit that “people” are at the heart of organizational resilience we also argue that having staff that are resilient should be considered a necessary but not sufficient condition for organizational level resilience. Instead, we conceptualize organizational resilience as a continuum where the overall level of resilience for a given organization depends on the relationships and interactions among all four layers of the model. For example, factors that enhance organizational resilience at the “people” level could be present, but a lack of enhancers and an overabundance of inhibiting factors at the “organizational context for change” or “organizational processes” levels could jeopardize the organization’s ability to cope with change (i.e., the organization’s resilience). This view, which is consistent with the definition of resilience provided by Gittell et al. (2006) implies that organizational resilience can be changed over time by addressing concerns at the level that is limiting the organization’s ability to cope with change.

Our model supports two complementary views of resilience depending on whether the researcher or practitioner wants to begin with their human capital and move outward toward the environment or vice versa. In the first case, to be resilient, organizations need first to have the right raw material (satisfied, committed and flexible employees, a supportive culture, good leadership and management). The ability of these employees to weather excessive change could then be improved by implementing sound change management practices and paying attention to the pace of change (the second layer of the onion). Attention then needs to be paid to the third layer of the onion which includes communication and work processes that influence how people at the organization are told about and involved in change. In this case, resilience could be enhanced by ensuring that communication around the change is done in a timely fashion and new “organizational processes” are in place to help employees conceptualize and deal with the changes they are facing. If all these factors are in place but the organization is still not resilient to change, then the practitioner needs to pay attention to the final layer of the onion, the “external environment” in which the change is taking place. Of note are our findings linking the ability to resource the change to the organization’s ability to cope with change (the organization could cope with change when the budget was there but was unsuccessful when funds were limited). It would appear from this study that a lack of resources may erode an organization’s ability to deal with excessive change, regardless of the other enabling factors identified in this study.

In the second situation, one could use this model to describe how an organization who is faced with difficult changes in their external environment can perhaps develop the resilience needed to cope with these external drivers of change (i.e., moving from the outer layer of the model to the inner most layer). In this case, we would posit that when funds and other resources are limited, organizations can increase resilience by focusing on how they communicate this need to change to their employees and ensuring that they put work processes in place that help employees do their job despite the lack of resources. This would then trigger putting in place change management practices that facilitate resilience including the appointment of an appropriate person to lead the change, selecting a change initiative(s) that employees could get behind and that would serve as a catalyst for needed change, and mechanisms to control the pace of change wherever possible.

Comparison With Existing Models of Organizational Resilience

To better understand how this model of organizational resilience compares to the extant work on this topic we revisited the models identified in our literature review. Three similarities that this study’s model shares with the preexisting models should be noted. First, the inclusion of “people” in our model is consistent with much of the existing work on organizational resilience based on the psychological view, which includes individuals (i.e., people) as a central component of organizational level resilience (e.g., Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011; Mallak, 1998). Second, the inclusion of “organizational processes” in our model is consistent with existing organizational resilience models based on an ecological or systems perspective, which tend to emphasize the important role of processes in enabling an organization to better respond to environmental change (e.g., Gittell et al., 2006; Lee et al., 2013; Bhamra et al., 2011). Finally, the “external environment” is included as one layer in our model, which is consistent with the central role that environment in general, and finances in particular, has played in other models that tend to focus on resilience as related to an organization’s ability to access resources in the environment (e.g., Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011; Pal et al., 2014).

Comparing our model of organizational resilience to the previously reviewed models from the literature also revealed four notable differences, or ways that this study expands theory in this domain. First, the use of nested concentric circles in this model facilitates the visual representation of the multilevel nature of the concept. Many scholars have defined resilience as a concept that involves relationships across levels (Lee et al., 2013; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011). The use of boxes and arrows in diagrams of existing organizational resilience models (e.g., Gittell et al., 2006; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011; Pal et al., 2014) seems at odds, however, with this fundamental property of organizational resilience.

Second, our model provides a more comprehensive view of how people may help or hinder an organization’s ability to cope with change. The psychological view of organizational resilience tends to imply that resilient organizations are comprised of resilient employees (Mallak, 1998). Our findings expand on this notion in several ways. First, we argue that staff are just one element of the people level of organizational resilience, and that leadership, management and organizational culture are also important. Second, the findings indicate that it is not necessarily the resilience of staff that leads to organizational resilience. Instead our results suggest that how people are being managed (i.e., commitment, flexibility, unhappy staff, new staff, how employees are managed) may be more relevant to our understanding of how staff enhance and/or diminish an organization’s ability to deal with change. Simply put, the resilience of staff does not equal organizational resilience, an important assertion that differentiates this model from the prior literature.

A third difference between our model and the existing models of organizational resilience is the inclusion of “organizational context for change,” a dimension of resilience that is unique to this study. This layer, and the related findings that it represents imply that from an insider view, an organization’s ability to cope with change is related in some way to the organization’s approach to change (i.e., change management practices) as well as actual changes that have been previously implemented and the pace of change. Existing models of organizational resilience tend to imply some type of relationship between prior change and current resilience by using terms like “adaptability” (Bhamra et al., 2011) and “adaptive capacity” (Lee et al., 2013). Our model, however, is the first to our knowledge to explicitly acknowledge the potential relationship between historical changes and future organizational resilience.

Finally, we were struck by the fact that our data seem to suggest that one way to increase resilience is to “shake things up” by changing the status quo and making it hard for the organization to live in the past. In the interviews our informants talked about how the organization coped more effectively with change when it hired new people, changed locations, changed leaders, and introduced new processes. Again, this idea is not present in the other models of organizational resilience we reviewed but is consistent the seminal three stage model of change (unfreeze, change, refreeze) theorized by Kurt Lewin (Burnes, 2004). For Lewin, the process of change entails creating the perception that a change is needed (i.e., unfreezing), then moving toward the new, desired level of behavior (i.e., change) and finally, refreezing new behaviors as the norm (Burnes, 2004). Our study suggests that a similar process may apply to creating an organization that is resilient to change.

Limitations and Implications for Future Research

This study set out to understand the enhancers and inhibitors of organizational resilience. The inductive nature of our study means that our study was not crafted with the goal of generalizability in mind. Rather, our goal was to capture individuals’ emic view of organizational resilience in a manner that may be transferable to other contexts (Gioia et al., 2013). We, therefore, provide detailed information about our study’s context (i.e., Community Hospital and the changes it had undergone) and constructed tables to illustrate for the reader the findings from our data analysis. Both approaches facilitate transferability by allowing readers to develop their own inferences about when and how particular findings may be transferable to other contexts (Shah & Corley, 2006). It is hoped that this study will serve to motivate more studies in this area. Application of the approach followed in this study in other settings and contexts should lead to the development of a richer understanding of the organizational resilience construct.

It should also be noted that the model presented in this article is, arguably, limited in that it is not an exact representation of our data as we were unable to determine from what our individual interviewees said whether organizational resilience should be modeled as a nested and/or multilayered concept. Our review of the literature indicated, however, that the notion that resilience (organizational or otherwise) is multilayered is one of the well accepted properties of the construct across scholarly disciplines (Bhamra et al., 2011). Accordingly, the inclusion of multiple layers as a property within our model strengthens the transferability of this model in that the model itself represents both the emic findings from our data analysis and the well-established properties of resilience. Future research on organizational change can use the model of resilience developed in this study to empirically investigate resilience in other organizational contexts and test the propositions outlined earlier.

Implications for Practice

The conscious and deliberate efforts undertaken in this study to understand the employees’ view of organizational resilience within an organization that had undergone substantive change means that findings from this study can be of use to those managing transformation within organizations in three very direct ways. First, the model derived from our findings suggests that people (staff, leadership and organizational culture) are the core, or heart, or organizational resilience. Accordingly, managers that are interested in enhancing their organization’s ability to cope with change may find it useful to start by focusing on developing resilient people. For instance, managers tasked with implementing major changes might first want to introduce initiatives designed to more broadly target aspects of the “people” layer that may be acting as inhibitors of resilience (e.g., poor leadership ability, disengaged staff, or an entrenched and resistant organizational culture). Second, our findings suggest that prior organizational changes impact an organization’s ability to cope with future changes (both positively and negatively). Managers may be able to construct more effective change implementation strategies if they consider the experience of change from their employees’ view. Such an understanding on the behalf of the manager could result in the development of change implementation strategies that better suit the reality of organizational life for employees. Finally, the findings from this study caution practitioners to resource any change efforts appropriately if they wish to ensure that their organization is resilient to change moving forward.

Conclusions

This study set out to understand how employees view organizational resilience by identifying the factors that they perceive as responsible for enhancing and/or diminishing their organization’s ability to cope with change over time. Our findings, and proposed model for organizational resilience from the insider perspective, contribute to the extant work on organizational change and organizational resilience in the following ways. First, our model is the first, to our knowledge, to illustrate the multilevel nature of the resilience concept in the organizational context showing that resilient people are just one of the elements needed for organizational resilience. Second, our findings revealed the idea that prior organizational changes can both enhance and inhibit the organizations current ability to cope with change—an idea not explicitly included in other organizational resilience models. Third, our model is one of the first (with one exception Pal et al., 2014—which focused on economic resilience), to consider how different aspects of organizational resilience can act as both enhancers and inhibitors of the organization’s resilience—sometimes simultaneously. Finally, our model suggests that resilience can be enhanced if one makes the effort to unfreeze the organization before introducing change. This is particularly important when the change is continuous and excessive.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR Grant No.: KAL-114089).

Notes

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