The Relationship between Resilience and Sustainability in the Organizational Context—A Systematic Review

Abstract

Crises such as the global COVID-19 pandemic and crisis-related factors such as the continued rise in commodity prices continue to have a tremendous impact on organizations. Organizational sustainability, understood as the ability of organizations to survive and thrive in the short and long term, depends on organizational resilience. This study bridges the literature on resilience and sustainability in the organizational context, covering the last 35 years of research, to provide a broader understanding of how organizations, adverse events, and organizational sustainability interrelate. In this paper, we perform a systematic review of the literature from 1985 to 2021, which we supplement with a content analysis, recent empirical findings, and a citation network analysis. We investigate connections between these two fields and identify studies on how the measures of or actions associated with organizational resilience and sustainability can complement or substitute for each other with regard to organizational performance. In addition, we develop an extended framework for categorizing the studies we consider here and the relationships between resilience and sustainability they examine. Our analysis identifies works that bridge the streams of research on organizational resilience and sustainability but also reveals gaps in the literature that open avenues for future research. Overall, most of the ‘bridging’ studies emphasize that the two fundamental concepts are interdependent and regard organizational resilience as a component of organizational sustainability.