A contribution to the interpretation of organizational resilience (Or) based on the analysis of key drivers and conceptual elements

Organizations are increasingly confronted with unexpected events, which can occur within or outside the organization and relate to various dimensions or aspects. The significance and extent of its impact on the organization can be quite surprising (Duchek 2020). Despite the fact that academic interest in this subject area has grown steadily in recent years, its conceptualization is not yet fully developed. There is no consensus on the meaning of resilience and the elements it contains. This paper contributes to the understanding and need for organizational resilience (OR) and also reveals gaps in its conceptualization. Resilience is understood as the ability of an organization to repel, prepare for, consider, absorb, recover from and adapt ever more successfully to actual or potential adverse events. Those events are either catastrophes or processes of change with catastrophic outcome which can have human, technical or natural causes.(Thoma 2014) In order to survive in an uncertain environment and promote future success, organizations must be able to deal with all these manifestations of the unexpected and catapult themselves out of the crisis. They have to develop a capacity for resilience that enables them to react appropriately to unexpected events and to make capital from events that could potentially threaten the survival of an organization (Lengnick-Hall et al. 2011; Duchek 2020; Denyer 2017; Aguilar 1967). In literature and practice, there are various approaches to OR, which consist of phase models that also allow an assessment of an organization as resilience using a maturity model. From the examined methods in this paper it follows that the resilience capability is questioned only after occurrence of an adverse event and no "preparation phase" according to the Fraunhofer resilience cycle exists. This ex post approach endangers not only the competitive position, but also the existence of an organization.