Organizational resilience is an organization’s ability to respond to a challenging situation, often an unexpected one. Resilience has become one of the most highly valued organizational capabilities given the number and intensity of crises of all kinds over recent decades. A company can demonstrate resilience in the way it responds to a natural disaster such as a flood or earthquake, a financial crisis that threatens bankruptcy, or a restrictive regulatory change, for example. In this post, we aim to clarify the concept of organizational resilience, provide some examples of resilient companies, and identify key approaches for building resilience within organizations.
## What Exactly Does Organizational Resilience Mean?
The concept of resilience originally comes from the field of psychology, where the main focus is on how individuals respond to difficult situations. In companies, people play an important role in responding to adversity, but other collective elements specific to an organization must also be taken into account, including its assets, strategy, and organizational structure.
Interest in organizational resilience began to grow in the 1980s, when several studies highlighted the rigidity organizations often display precisely when an external threat should be prompting them to change. Some of the most common reactions within companies when serious problems arise include difficulty finding someone willing to take responsibility for the problem, delays in decision-making, and a lack of resources or capabilities to implement unconventional responses.
## The Importance of Business Resilience and Some Examples
An organization that is able to respond effectively to a challenging situation can gain a significant competitive advantage over others when a serious problem affects an entire industry or market. Some companies that are now regarded as outstanding success stories can also illustrate how resilience helped them overcome situations that once appeared likely to lead to failure. We will focus on two examples:
**LEGO** came close to disappearing as technological forms of entertainment developed rapidly, contributing to the closure of many traditional toy companies. However, LEGO relied on innovation and quality, combined with a focus on popular themes and characters from movies and entertainment, to progressively expand its product portfolio and appeal to customers across different age groups.
**Netflix** began as a company that delivered movies to customers by mail. The rise of the Internet and cable television led to the closure of almost all traditional movie-rental businesses and has also seriously weakened the profitability of movie theaters. Netflix identified an opportunity in streaming technology and later began developing its own content, becoming one of the fastest-growing companies in recent years.
## How to Become Resilient—and Some Evidence Showing What Works
In general, it is important to identify the broad organizational characteristics that can foster resilience. Although there is no complete consensus on the issue, several characteristics are commonly regarded as particularly important when dealing with challenging situations:
**Innovation.** It is difficult to overcome a serious problem by continuing to do exactly the same things the company was doing before the problem emerged.
**Flexibility.** People and organizational structures are often resistant to change, and this rigidity can become even stronger when people are afraid of the risks associated with a crisis. Yet those are precisely the moments when urgent changes are often required. Flexibility is therefore especially important for organizational resilience.
**Leadership.** Leaders play a dual role: they must establish ambitious and different objectives while also being able to engage people throughout the organization in working toward them.
**Available resources.** Having a reserve, or “stock,” of available resources—whether physical, financial, or relational—provides valuable support during a crisis and can strengthen an organization’s ability to respond resiliently.
Organizational resilience therefore depends on effectively integrating internal and external characteristics in order to respond to crisis situations. For example, in a recent study I co-authored with Elena Mellado-García and Natalia Ortiz-de-Mandojana, we analyzed 359 companies that had experienced a crisis and found that the characteristics of their investors can help prevent a subsequent relapse. More specifically, greater investor diversity and the presence of patient investors support organizational resilience. The findings also highlight that overcoming a crisis is not simply about recovering quickly; it is also about creating conditions that reduce the likelihood of falling into another crisis later on.
During the COVID-19 crisis, the most resilient companies were able to make significant changes, such as transforming their business models to remain competitive—for example, by expanding online sales as an alternative to in-store sales—or adjusting their functional strategies, such as adapting to remote work in response to the risks associated with people gathering in enclosed spaces.
In a lecture at the University of Granada, Professor Alberto Aragón identified five key strategic elements that enabled some companies to emerge from the pandemic relatively successfully compared with their competitors: digitalization, logistics adaptation, internationalization, flexibility, and cooperation. You may be interested in hearing his explanation directly in the lecture, where you can also find some useful examples of how these approaches can be implemented. If you do not have much time, the section beginning at 49:15 provides a useful summary.
Finally, it is also important to emphasize that a crisis does not necessarily mean that a company should change course. Sometimes resilience means being able to maintain strategic decisions in a context in which abandoning them would be the easier option. In another study I co-authored, also with Elena Mellado-García and Natalia Ortiz-de-Mandojana, we analyzed 190 companies that had successfully emerged from periods of crisis and found that companies that maintain ambitious environmental strategies during a financial crisis tend to recover more quickly. We suggest that one reason is that this behavior helps maintain investor commitment, facilitating access to resources, trust, and strategic support. Sustainability may therefore be not only an objective for periods of prosperity, but also a tool for strengthening resilience when difficulties arise.
## Conclusion
In conclusion, resilience can be extremely valuable to a company’s competitiveness. However, it is a very difficult capability to develop because it depends on many different and highly diverse factors. In addition, periods of crisis are precisely the moments when it is most difficult for an organization to respond effectively. Do you think your company is resilient? Are you resilient yourself? Why?
## More Information
If you would like a detailed overview of research on organizational resilience, the following article provides a very useful summary:
Linnenluecke, M. K. (2017). “Resilience in business and management research: A review of influential publications and a research agenda.” *International Journal of Management Reviews*, 19(1), 4–30.
If you would like to read in more detail two articles on this topic that I co-authored and that present the research discussed above, see:
Mellado-Garcia, E., Aragon-Correa, J. A., & Ortiz-de-Mandojana, N. (2026). “Reinforcing corporate sustainability in times of crisis: a legitimacy perspective of resilience.” *European Business Review*, 38(3), 363–384. [https://www.emerald.com/ebr/article/38/3/363/1342070](https://www.emerald.com/ebr/article/38/3/363/1342070)
Mellado-Garcia, E., Ortiz-de-Mandojana, N., & Aragon-Correa, J. A. (2025). “Avoiding relapses after crises: Exploring the influence of firm investors’ characteristics on organizational resilience.” *BRQ Business Research Quarterly*, 28(2), 514–529. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23409444241243377](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23409444241243377)
If you would like to watch a video that illustrates, in an entertaining way, how difficult it can be to react to a problem, we recommend this one: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw1GuJXCENo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw1GuJXCENo)
Images in this post: Image by jhfl from [http://www.pixabay.com](http://www.pixabay.com)