CALL FOR PAPERS Group and Organization Management (GOM)

Organizational Resilience: A Special Issue to Integrate and Broaden a Growing Literature Using Multi-Level Perspectives

For information regarding the full call, please follow this link.

Special Issue Editors:
Sebastian Raetze, Technische Universität Dresden, Germany
Stephanie Duchek, Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany
Bradley L. Kirkman, North Carolina State University, USA

GOM Associate Editor Liaison: M. Travis Maynard, Colorado State University, USA

Submission Process and Deadline:

• The submission window will open on April 1, 2020 and the deadline for submission is May 15, 2020.
• GOM anticipates publishing this Special Issue end 2021.
• Manuscripts should be submitted through the GOM online submission system: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gom (please select “Special Issue Paper” as the manuscript type).
• Manuscripts should be formatted according to the GOM submission guidelines.

Background & Rationale for the Special Issue

The competitive landscape that organizations operate within is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (Whittington et al., 1999). As a result, companies today are facing high demands and are frequently confronted with critical situations, many of which are unexpected and can potentially threaten their survival. In addition to the organizational-level impact of such challenges, the teams and individuals in these organizations are also affected when such challenges occur.

Given these challenges, organizations, their units, and members need to develop approaches to effectively deal with adversity and foster future success (Lengnick-Hall, et al., 2011). Although there are numerous literature streams that apply to such phenomena, resilience is one of the more popular constructs that has been discussed in both academic- and practitioner-oriented outlets. Resilience is generally conceptualized as how effective a system deals with adversity or critical situations (Bhamra & Dani, 2011) and interest in the topic of resilience in organizations has grown rapidly in recent years. Although a great deal of theoretical attention and empirical work has emerged on this topic over the past two decades (e.g., Chapman et al., 2018; Linnenluecke, 2017; Stoverink et al., 2018), significant gaps still exist in our understanding of resilience in organizations. This is because research on resilience in organizations across different disciplines and levels of analysis has developed in a rather silo-like fashion without serious attempts to synthesize the prevailing conceptualizations and the empirical evidence regarding both antecedents and outcomes of resilience.

Thus, the current state of the resilience literature represents a loose accumulation of heterogeneous and partly overlapping viewpoints with inconsistent definitions, conceptualizations, measurements, as well as empirical evidence regarding both antecedents and outcomes of resilience. This has certainly hindered the development of a unified understanding of this field. Accordingly, and in order to prevent resilience from turning into a “quicksand term” (Britt et al., 2016), we have witnessed an ongoing call for more multi-level and cross-disciplinary research on resilience in organizational settings (e.g., Linnenluecke, 2017; Youssef & Luthans, 2005).

However, such calls have not resulted in much progress in this area. Against this background, this special issue of GOM will focus on cross-level and interdisciplinary integration of organization-related resilience research. In particular, we hope to publish research that places a stronger emphasis on team resilience given its potential to link resilience relationships between organizational and individual levels of analysis.

Objectives of the Special Issue

All research that provides a significant contribution to our understanding of multi- and cross-level resilience phenomena in organizational settings is welcome. This includes, but is not limited to, the following topics of interests:

• The connection between different resilience levels (e.g., can resilient teams and organizations be developed by bringing together resilient individuals?);
• Team resilience as a potential linking pin for connecting research at the individual and organizational levels of analysis;
• Cross-level antecedents and outcomes, including analysis of factors that may shape resilience in individuals, teams, and organizations simultaneously;
• Interrelations and interactions at higher levels of analysis (e.g., inter-organizational or civic level of analysis);
• Trans-contextual and context-specific resilience mechanisms and influencing factors at each level of analysis;
• The transfer best practices between different fields;
• The emergence of collective resilience in networks or multiteam systems;
• Appropriate conceptualizations of resilience at each level and across the different levels of analysis, including answers to the question of whether resilience can and should be conceptualized in the same why across different levels of analysis;
• Triggers or events that give rise to the need for individuals, teams, and organizations to be resilient;
• Measurement of resilience, including how best to measure resilience from a multilevel perspective;
• Differentiation of resilience from related constructs, such as adaptability, flexibility, reflexivity, etc.

This is an open call for papers. We welcome submissions from scholars in different disciplines as well as multiple methodological approaches.

Authors who have questions are encouraged to contact one of the Special Issue editors:

Sebastian Raetze: sebastian.raetze@tu-dresden.de
Stephanie Duchek: stephanie.duchek@b-tu.de
Bradley L. Kirkman: blkirkma@ncsu.edu