Bouncing back, if not beyond: Challenges for research on resilience
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Bouncing back, if not beyond: Challenges for research on resilience Martin Hoegl1 · Silja Hartmann2 Received: 8 April 2020 / Accepted: 25 August 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Setbacks are a fact of life for individuals and collectives—and resilience is a key concept in explaining why some entities positively adapt (i.e., bounce back) or even emerge stronger (i.e., bounce beyond), while others suffer from such events, sometimes permanently. In this short note, we briefly introduce the concept of resilience before moving to three key challenges for management research in this field. With this, we would like to encourage the international scholarly research community to view any phenomenon of their interest also from a resilience perspective, considering significant setbacks and processes of positive adaptation. Keywords Resilience · Setbacks · Positive adaptation · Cross-level · Events · Crosscultural · Inter-cultural
Introduction No individual, no team, no organization, no nation, or collective of any type simply always rushes from one success to the next. Instead, setbacks and the experience of adverse circumstances are a fact of live as humans and larger systems consistently face a multitude of internal and external life prompts, stressors, opportunities, and other forms of change (Richardson 2002). With regard to organizational contexts, this is amplified against the backdrop of increasingly dynamic business environments, such as in China or India, as well as cross-national interdependencies and business relationships within Asia and with the rest of the world. Management research addresses this reality from at least two main perspectives, risk management Martin Hoegl and Silja Hartmann have contributed equally to this article. * Martin Hoegl [email protected] 1
Institute for Leadership and Organization, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Geschwister‑Scholl‑Platz 1, 80539 Munich, Germany
2
Chair of Organization, Freie Universität Berlin, Garystr. 21, 14195 Berlin, Germany
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and resilience (Fiksel et al. 2015; van der Vegt et al. 2015). The notion of risk management caters, more or less implicitly, to the idea of risks being something that can be assessed ex ante and aims at creating protective measures commensurate to the risk assessment. The concept of resilience differs from this logic in several important ways. First, the term resilience refers to “positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity” (Luthar et al. 2000: p. 543) and is therefore less concerned with questions of risk predictions and prevention, but rather starts its analysis with a significant setback event. Such setbacks can take various shapes and forms, ranging from individuals’ setbacks, such as being passed over once again for a career promotion or teams’ setbacks, such as a major work project being prematurely terminated due to strategy changes by upper management, all the way to large-scale company or industry setbacks, such as the ‘Diesel-Gate’ scandal of 2015, t
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