Achieving organizational resilience through complex adaptive systems approach: a conceptual framework

Abstract

Purpose The global business environment causes different and difficult kinds of problems that threaten organizational survival. As an important solution, the organizational resilience concept arises and offers holistic philosophy. The resilience concept offers multidisciplinary and valuable eclectic literature to organizational studies that help to produce a wide variety of solutions but causes a lack of consensus to measure and apply resilience at an organizational level. To fill this gap, this paper aims to offer the complex adaptive systems (CAS) approach as a lens to organizations. This paper aims to offer that CAS provides a suitable toolkit to address the organizational resilience concept as it has the potential to offer more generalizable guidance. Design/methodology/approach To reach that goal, this research follows a two-phase systematic literature review. In the first phase, the purpose is to search past five years’ studies (2015–2020) to figure out current trends in organizational resilience concepts. In the second phase, organizational resilience studies, which include the CAS approach, are checked to analyze the alignment procedures of two concepts. Findings Literature shows that the organizational resilience concept has rarely worked from the CAS lens.CAS are more resilient via adaptation and learning as they depend on local interactions that shape and co-evolve together with their dynamic environment, which helps the emergence of self-organization in an unpredictable future. To achieve organizational resilience, the CAS lens proposes a generalizable and applicable framework to organizational studies. Research limitations/implications Future research should also explore the impact of the interrelationship between two concepts; quantitative and qualitative methods should be applied to be able to get empirical results. Practical implications CAS lens could be used as a contemporary design idea. The CAS approach enables the learning and adaptation requirement of the organizational resilience concept, which helps to create dynamic capabilities to handle turbulent changes and gain long-lasting competitiveness. Designing organizations’ agents from CAS viewpoint helps to understand and be ready for new trends, such as digitalization or Industry 4.0. Social implications Evaluating organizations from the CAS lens as living systems that co-evolve with their environments reveals different ways to achieve organizational resilience management philosophy. Designing organizations as CAS promotes organizational adaptation and learning, which improves organizational decision-making, increasing organizational resilience in organizations. Originality/value The originality of the study lies in proposing to achieve organizational resilience via CAS lenses and offering a conceptual framework to achieve organizational resilience.