Culture Matters: Organizational Resilience in the Face of Crisis

Abstract

Abstract OVERVIEW: The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations worldwide to show short-term organizational resilience by shifting rapidly to remote work to ensure business continuity and often survival. Various factors—including work content, process design, technology literacy, and culture—shaped how smoothly each organization navigated this transition. Over time, most organizations found a new equilibrium between remote and on-site work arrangements. These adaptation processes exemplify long-term organizational resilience. To explore these forms of resilience in innovation-focused organizations, we conducted an 18-month longitudinal study of four R&D units within large global industrial firms. The data reveal that short-term resilience can differ significantly from long-term resilience within organizations, and that long-term resilience can vary in both outcome and process across organizations. The process-oriented lens allows for identifying different resilience pathways. This divergence can be attributed to the organizations’ cultures. Deeply ingrained cultural norms shape organizational narratives, enabling some crisis responses but constraining others, as such norms cannot be easily altered once a crisis hits. For practitioners, the most appropriate time to build organizational resilience is long before a crisis strikes. PRACTITIONER TAKEAWAYS Recognize that short-term and long-term resilience responses look very different. For short-term resilience (during a crisis) to be effective, leaders must understand which resilience responses align with their organization’s culture and which do not. Building long-term resilience capabilities (for the next crisis) requires establishing the appropriate organizational culture.