Bouncing Back: Building Resilience Through Social and Environmental Practices in the Context of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

Even though organizational researchers have acknowledged the role of social and environmental business practices in contributing to organizational resilience, this work remains scarce, possibly because of the difficulties in measuring organizational resilience. In this paper, we aim to partly remedy this issue by measuring two ways in which organizational resilience manifests through organizational outcomes in a generalized environmental disturbance—namely, severity of loss, which captures the stability dimension of resilience, and time to recovery, which captures the flexibility dimension. By isolating these two variables, we can then theorize the types of social and environmental practices that contribute to resilience. Specifically, we argue that strategic social and environmental practices contribute more to organizational resilience than do tactical social and environmental practices. We test our theory by analyzing the responses of 963 U.S.-based firms to the global financial crisis and find evidence that support our hypotheses.