Organizational Structural Construct Based on a Framework for Reliability, Safety, and Deployment of Organizational Resources

Introduction

Organizations seek to improve resilience of structure and functions, assets and infrastructure against disruption, degradation, and destruction. Organizational resilience can be evaluated on its facilities, infrastructure, and supply chains (Kohno et al. 2012). Organizational resilience is considered as a second‐order construct but manifests at the first‐order level constructs identified by Richtnér and Löfsten (2014) as cognitive, structural and emotional resources linked to organizational creativity. Resilience is also the considered as the ability to absorb, stabilize the system structure, achieve function and identity in the cope of shocks.

A methodology to develop organizational resilience is based on structures and processes aimed to enhance the ability to respond to disruptions and create opportunities (Denver, 2017, p. 20). Organizational resilience can be defined in terms of its outcome or what does, as “the maintenance of positive adjustment under challenging conditions such that the organization emerges from those conditions strengthened and more resourceful” (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003; Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2007).

Enhancing organizational resilience has a variety of concepts, principles, approaches, guidelines, and elements which combined enable to design a framework to be implemented at different organizational levels combined with different factors at each level, creating and developing a theoretical model to influence organizational resilience. The concept of organizational resilience can be a single at the organizational level or multi‐level concept (Linnenluecke, 2017) constructed and achieved at different organizational collective levels. Organizational resilience from the perspective of individual level is based on the inference that the organization is resilience as its individuals (Coutu, 2002; Horne, 1997; Horne and Orr 1998; Mallak 1998; Shin et al. 2012).

The concept of organizational resilience emerges from cognitive and engineering sciences among others to create and develop a framework for structural construct of organizational resilience supported on elements based on flexibility of organizational culture, organizational safety and reliability, the promotion elements, and the deployment of organizational resources. All these issues include relevant literature studies, their differences, and aspects, which are explained in more detail in the following subtitles.

Organizational resilience constructs contribute to theoretical development and testing following the dialectical process of a lifecycle in construct development ion include both the validity police and the opposing perspective of an advocate perspective to achieve organizational effectiveness (Brahma 2009; Suddaby 2010; Hirsch and Levin 1999). A construct taxonomy and development based on methodological literature leads to assess and evaluate the literature (Law et al. 1998; Podsakoff et al. 2016; Wong et al. 2008).

This analysis is different to other approaches on organizational resilience structural construct evaluation in the sense that proposes an integrated new model of measurement based on the resilience performance of all the different organizational levels. This model is proposed to being structurally constructed at the different organizational levels through a hypothetical organizational resilience construct development and measurement from a multidisciplinary perspective and not to be confused with the criticized multidimensional constructs as a group of interrelated constructs. The organizational structural construct evaluation is supported by the attributes given by the attributes of the flexibility of the organizational culture, the organizational safety and reliability, the promotion elements for organizational resilience and the deployment of organizational resources.