Organizational resilience and interorganizational relationships: An exploration of Chinese business service firms

You, Jacqueline Jing; Williams, Christopher

Abstract

Much research on organizational resilience has focused on the intraorganizational capacity that enables positive adjustment to disruption. Yet, when seen as open systems, organizations are highly interdependent and interconnected with many other actors. This raises the question of how interorganizational relationships (IORs) affect organizational resilience. We explore this using a novel inductive two-stage approach incorporating fuzzy cognitive mapping to identify the relational determinants of organizational resilience in the context of Chinese business service firms. Using this technique reveals five relational dimensions, which we label relational competence, innovative assimilation, integrative trustworthiness, identity constraints, and asymmetry. The analysis also shows how these interrelate to either positively or negatively affect organizational resilience. This is a new way of understanding organizational resilience and shows how it is determined by a complex interplay between IOR attributes in the external relational environment of the organization.

Citation

You, J. J., & Williams, C. (in press). Organizational resilience and interorganizational relationships: An exploration of Chinese business service firms. European Management Review, https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12558

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jan 7, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Jan 30, 2023
• Deposit Date: May 22, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: May 22, 2023
• Journal: European Management Review
• Print ISSN: 1740-4754
• Electronic ISSN: 1740-4762
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12558
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1173933