Measuring Organizational Resilience: A Scale Development

Today’s business context is characterized by hyper competition, uncertainty, and ambiguity. Added to this is the unfortunate increase in the occurrence and the intensity of the natural disasters and crises situations including economic, political and social events. Accordingly, all the changes in the external environment amplified the significance of ‘resilience’ for all organizations. Resilient individuals and organizations positively adapt to changing conditions without showing any stress (Mallak, 1998), and thus today organizations desire to be resilient to easily adapt to changing circumstances and move forward. Organizational resilience term is highly adopted in organizational theory field and specifically in crisis management and disaster management literatures, and recently in strategic management literature. Yet, there is not an agreed upon and commonly accepted scale of organizational resilience. Accordingly, the organizational resilience literature is yet to develop regarding quantitative studies. This study attempts to fill this gap by developing a reliable and valid scale of organizational resilience construct through adopting both qualitative and quantitative methods.