Surviving and thriving: an organizational resilience framework in the digital age

Purpose – Enterprises face increasing risks and uncertainties in evolving business environments and must develop organizational resilience to facilitate responses to unpredictable crises. Specifically, scholars and practitioners are interested in leveraging digital technology to establish digital resilience, which helps enterprises withstand and effectively respond to disruptions. However, the way in which digital resilience contributes to organizational resilience has not yet been thoroughly investigated. This study explores the dimensions of organizational resilience, focusing on how digital resilience affects other forms of resilience. Design/methodology/approach – This study applies a mixed-methods approach based on the people-process-technology framework, including a qualitative study of six enterprises and a survey of 226 enterprises. Findings – The results indicate that the three key dimensions of organizational resilience are digital resilience (i.e. fault tolerance and intelligent operation and maintenance), staff resilience (i.e. employee resilience and leadership resilience) and operational resilience (i.e. absorption and recoverability). Moreover, digital resilience, staff resilience and the interaction between the two dimensions positively affect operational resilience. Specifically, digital resilience increases performance by promoting staff and operational resilience, and the impacts of staff and operational resilience on performance can be moderated by digital nativity. Originality/value – The research findings presented herein further elucidate the fundamental role of digital resilience and provide actionable insights to managers regarding their development of organizational resilience.