Where research meet
The first newsletter from the community was just distributed. If you have any information that you would like distributed or are curious about the community, please email info@organizingextremecontexts.org. A copy of the newsletter is found below.
Here is the link: https://mailchi.mp/8a19a9f706f5/organizingextremecontexts?e=ce27d00106
Group & Organization Management (GOM) will publish a special issue of the journal on the subject of resilience in organizations, specifically focused on using a multi-level perspective.
Guest Editors: Sebastian Raetze (Technische Universität Dresden), Stephanie Duchek (Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg), & Bradley L. Kirkman (North Carolina State University)
GOM Associate Editor Liaison: M. Travis Maynard (Colorado State University)
Background & Rationale for the Special Issue
The competitive landscape that organizations operate within is increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (Whittington, Pettigrew, Peck, Fenton, & Conyon, 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. In particular, these issues may result in additional pressure and adversity at lower levels of analysis. For example, Alliger, Cerasoli, Tannenbaum, & Vessey (2015) offered a list of potential team challenges in organizations and argue that they could exhaust teams’ members and impair important team dynamics thus hindering team performance. Similarly, at the individual level of analysis, potential negative consequences of uncertainty and high demands in the workplace are well documented (Aronsson et al., 2017) and are reflected in increased mental health problems, absences and rising economic health costs (National Center for Health Statistics, 2017).
Given these challenges, organizations, their units, and members need to develop approaches to effectively deal with adversity and foster future success (Lengnick-Hall, Beck, & Lengnick-Hall, 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, Kirkman, Mistry, & Rosen, 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.
Organizational resilience research at the individual level of analysis is the most established relative to
science in the late 1980s with the seminal work on career resilience as an important resource in career management (London, 1983), research at this level of analysis has grown tremendously, advanced by investigations in the area of positive organizational behavior (e.g., Youssef & Luthans, 2007) as well as on occupations characterized by high or specific work demands, including healthcare professionals, social workers, teachers, military personnel, or police officers (e.g., Cornum, Matthews, & Seligman, 2011; Jackson, Firtko, & Edenboroug, 2007). Accordingly, in comparison to the other levels of analysis, research on individual resilience offers extensive empirical findings on antecedents, outcomes, mediators and moderators, as well as work focusing on the conceptualization and measurement of resilience. Yet, because of the many disciplines involved, results still differ widely, and the role of contextual differences (e.g., can findings from nursing science be transferred to employees in business organizations?) is hardly considered.
Since the mid-1990s resilience research also gained growing momentum at the organizational level of analysis, starting with early work on High Reliability Organizations (Weick, 1993), as well as research focusing on major catastrophes (e.g., 9/11) and global crises in the 2000s (e.g., Burke, 2005). While conceptualizations, methodologies, perspectives, and results of organizational resilience studies are heterogeneous, and thus difficult to compare, research at this level of analysis also developed quickly and broadened our understanding of resilience to include a greater emphasis on resilient processes and resilient capabilities (e.g., Duchek, 2019; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011). Yet, empirical results, and particularly quantitative studies, are still scant and often retrospective due to the complexity of measuring resilience at this higher level of analysis.
More recently, and in response to the increasing importance of teams in organizations, resilience has also gained interest at the team level of analysis (e.g., Blatt, 2009; West, Patera, & Carsten, 2009). Although research at this level of analysis is also growing, it is still in its infancy and there is still much work to do to more fully understand the complex construct, its sources, and consequences, due to the tightly coupled, highly interdependent exchanges among team members needed to gain team resilience (Raetze, forthcoming; Stoverink et al., 2018). Accordingly, many studies at this level of analysis lack a clear and level-appropriate conceptualization of resilience (Chapman et al., 2018), and empirical results are mainly occurring in very specific contexts, including elite sport teams, control room or emergency response teams (e.g., Gomes, Borges, Huber, & Carvalho, 2014; Morgan, Fletcher, & Sarkar, 2015). Moreover, research at the team level of analysis is embedded in other research topics that focus on similar phenomena, including team adaptation (Kennedy, Landon, & Maynard, 2016), and therefore more clarity is needed around these related, but distinct constructs.
In sum, the current state of the resilience literature represents a loose accumulation of heterogeneous and partly overlapping viewpoints and has thus produced 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; Zellars et al., 2011). In fact, recently, King, Newman, and Luthans (2016) characterize resilience in the workplace as an important but severely under-researched construct within the Organizational Behavior (OB) literature. By revealing exemplary shortcomings of previous resilience research, they concluded that future research has to “adopt a multilevel approach when studying resilience at work” (p. 784) in order to develop a better and more harmonized understanding of this complex construct.
However, such calls have not resulted in much progress in this area. Against this background, this special issue of Group & Organization Management 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
The aim of this special issue is to bring together cutting-edge conceptual, meta-analytical, review, and empirical research which provides a significant contribution to our understanding of multi- and cross-level resilience phenomena in organizational settings. Additionally, we aim to publish work that offers cross-disciplinary perspectives, and actively seeks to combine interdisciplinary and multi-method approaches and will include the following objectives:
GOM will accept manuscripts to be considered for this special issue beginning April 1, 2020, through May 15, 2020. Manuscripts should not be submitted before or after this date. We anticipate publishing this special issue end 2021. To submit a manuscript, please visit the website https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/gom (select “Special Issue Paper” as the manuscript type). Manuscripts should be formatted according to the GOM submission guidelines.
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
References
Bhamra, R., & Dani, S. (2011). Creating resilient SMEs. International Journal of Production Research, 49(18), 5373-5374.
Blatt, R. (2009). Resilience in entrepreneurial teams: Developing the capacity to pull through. Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research, 29(11), 1-14.
Britt, T. W., Shen, W., Sinclair, R. R., Grossman, M. R., & Klieger, D. M. (2016). How much do we really know about employee resilience?. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 9(2), 378-404.
Burke, R. J. (2005). Effects of 9/11 on individuals and organizations: Down but not out!. Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal, 14(5), 629-638.
Chapman, M. T., Lines, R. L., Crane, M., Ducker, K. J., Ntoumanis, N., Peeling, P., … & Gucciardi, D. F. (2018). Team resilience: A scoping review of conceptual and empirical work. Work & Stress, DOI: 10.1080/02678373.2018.1529064.
Cornum, R., Matthews, M. D., & Seligman, M. E. (2011). Comprehensive soldier fitness: Building resilience in a challenging institutional context. American Psychologist, 66(1), 4-9.
Duchek, S. (2019). Organizational resilience: A capability-based conceptualization. Business Research, DOI: 10.1007/s40685-019-0085-7.
Gomes, J. O., Borges, M. R., Huber, G. J., & Carvalho, P. V. R. (2014). Analysis of the resilience of team performance during a nuclear emergency response exercise. Applied Ergonomics, 45(3), 780-788.
Jackson, D., Firtko, A., & Edenborough, M. (2007). Personal resilience as a strategy for surviving and thriving in the face of workplace adversity: A literature review. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 60(1), 1-9.
Kennedy, D. M., Landon, L. B., & Maynard, M. T. (2016). Extending the conversation: Employee resilience at the team level. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 9(2), 466-475.
King, D. D., Newman, A., & Luthans, F. (2016). Not if, but when we need resilience in the workplace. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37(5), 782-786.
Organizational Resilience
Alliger, G. M., Cerasoli, C. P., Tannenbaum, S. I., & Vessey, W. B. (2015). Team resilience:
How teams flourish under pressure. Organizational Dynamics, 44(3), 176-184.
Aronsson, G., Theorell, T., Grape, T., Hammarström, A., Hogstedt, C., Marteinsdottir, I., … &
Hall, C. (2017). A systematic review including meta-analysis of work environment and burnout symptoms. BMC Public Health, DOI: 10.1186/s12889-017-4153-7.
Lengnick-Hall, C. A., Beck, T. E., & Lengnick-Hall, M. L. (2011). Developing a capacity for organizational resilience through strategic human resource management.Human Resource Management Review, 21(3), 243-255.
London, M. (1983). Toward a theory of career motivation. Academy of Management Review, 8(4), 620-630.
Morgan, P. B., Fletcher, D., & Sarkar, M. (2015). Understanding team resilience in the world’s best athletes: A case study of a rugby union World Cup winning team. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 16, 91-100.
National Center for Health Statistics (2017). Health, United States, 2016: With chartbook on long-term trends in health. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics.
Raetze, S. (Forthcoming). What makes work teams resilient? An overview of resilience processes and cross-level antecedents. In E. Powley, B. Caza, & A. Caza (Eds.), Handbook of organizational resilience. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Stoverink, A. C., Kirkman, B. L., Mistry, S., & Rosen, B. (2018). Bouncing back together: Toward a theoretical model of work team resilience. Academy of Management Review, DOI: 10.5465/amr.2017.0005.
Wanberg, C. R., & Banas, J. T. (2000). Predictors and outcomes of openness to changes in a reorganizing workplace. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(1), 132-142.
Weick, K. E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4), 628-652.
West, B. J., Patera, J. L., & Carsten, M. K. (2009). Team level positivity: Investigating positive psychological capacities and team level outcomes. Journal of Organizational Behavior: Journal of Organizational Behavior, 30(2), 249-267.
Youssef, C. M., & Luthans, F. (2005). Resiliency development of organizations, leaders and employees: Multi-level theory building for sustained performance. In W. L. Gardner, B. J. Avolio, & F. O. Walumbwa (Eds.), Authentic leadership theory and practice: Origins, effects and development (pp. 303-343). Oxford, UK: Elsevier Science.
Youssef, C. M., & Luthans, F. (2007). Positive organizational behavior in the workplace: The impact of hope, optimism, and resilience. Journal of Management, 33(5), 774-800.
Zellars, K. L., Justice, L., & Beck, T. E. (2011). Resilience: New paths for building and sustaining individual and organizational capacity. In P. L. Perrewé, & D. C. Ganster (Eds.), The role of individual differences in occupational stress and well-being (pp. 1- 37). Bingley, UK: Emerald.
Please find a Call for papers to the EGOS sub-theme on “The Role of Organizing in Extreme Contexts”.
A look at last week’s headlines suggests that the extreme might become the new normal: Dorian’s ravaging of the Bahamas and the Amazon on fire, failing peace talks between Trump’s administration and the Taliban, fractious infighting in “the mother of all parliaments” and likelihood of a no deal Brexit, and the resurgence of a powerful anti-gay lobby in Eastern Europe and elsewhere are but the latest in a series of unsettling changes: in weather patterns, in local and global politics, in the “othering” of LGBTQI+ and ethnic minorities.
This sub-theme is designed to explore our own place and work in such contexts. We hope that you will consider contributing to the theme and that will join us in advancing conversations on the role and importance of organizing in extreme contexts. For your convenience, we attach the text and the link below.
Link to sub-theme: https://www.egosnet.org/jart/prj3/egos/main.jart?rel=de&reserve-mode=active&content-id=1564449184268&subtheme_id=1542700474682
The sub-theme is the first of four sub-themes arranged within the “Organizing in and for Extreme Contexts” Standing Working Group (https://www.egosnet.org/swgs/current_swgs/SWG_14). Take the opportunity and join the conversation from the start!
Hope to see you in Hamburg!
/Markus Hällgren, Kathleen Sutcliffe & Mark de Rond If you have any questions, please email markus.hallgren@umu.se
NEEDS are looking for paper proposals and abstract submissions. Please have a look here for more information on tracks and theme.
Organized by Ignasi Marti, Martin Kornberger, Joep Cornelissen, Corinna Frey-Heger, Marian Gatzweiler& Renate Meyer
Date: May 16 & 17 2019
Time: Thursday 16 12noon – Friday 17 3pm
Location:Institute of Social Innovation, ESADE, Barcelona
Context:The problem of the organization and governance of collective action surfaces as particularly apparent in crisis situations such as in war zones or the management of large-scale humanitarian emergencies. Such contexts often evade clear-cut classification and present challenges in terms of polycentric governance, distributed decision-making and collective sensemaking for the actors involved. The instability of these settings, and the pressing need for collaboration amongst actors that do not necessarily share a common history, tradition or identity make the organization and governance of collective action particularly challenging.
Aim: With this workshop we want to investigate how collective action across a network of diverse actors is accomplished in such situations of crisis. Our focal question is: how can a collective of actors organize their capacity to act and make decisions in situations of crisis?
Conceptual orientation:The project explores collective action as form of collaboration and coordination beyond the well-worn modes of the state, market and hierarchy. With the concept of collective action we zoom in on how heterogeneous networks of actors that transcend organizational and institutional boundaries address crisis situations. Key questions include how the collective develops a sense of purpose and identity, a shared strategic direction, and sustains coherence in action. We seek to explore the institutional, organizational and strategic forces that enable and/or constrain effective collective action and its governance.
With crisis we delimit the empirical setting that we are interested in. We are inspired by the original meaning of the Greek word ‘crisis’ – which derives from krínein– meaning to decide and to incise: the crisis is the moment of decision, a radical interruption of temporality resulting in a loss of orientation that forces a decision which divides the flow of events into a before and after. In this sense, crisis situations are not only low-probability, high-impact events such as disasters, fires, or earthquakes; with the focus on crisis as decision-making under extreme contingency we also include empirical contexts addressing organizing under high uncertainty, in extreme contexts, or grand challenges.
Possible questions we want to pursue include:
The event: The workshop aims to provide a space for conceptual and empirical contributions as well as reflections on methods. The workshop is developmental and welcomes papers as well as work in progress.
We have planned a follow up workshop in Rotterdam in autumn 2019 to continue the conversation and, based on progress in Barcelona, work collectively towards a joint publication (such as a special issue or edited volume). Participation in both workshops is desirable but not mandatory.
Organizers: The workshop is a joint venture between
For more information please contact Martin Kornberger kornberger@em-lyon.comor Ignasi Marti ignasi.marti@esade.edu
Programme
Thursday
12-1pm Welcome & introduction Ignasi Marti & Martin Kornberger
1-2pm Marc Ventresca Organizing collective capacity in crisis: Analytic imageries from commons governance and action fields
2.15-3.15pm Arjen Boin, Collective action in the face of crisis: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina
3.30-4.30pm Daniel Geiger, Crafting Space: The Role of Spatial Practices in Managing Refugee Camps
4.30-5.30pm Open discussion: developing a research agenda
Drinks provided
Friday
9-10am Madeleine Rauch, Emotions, Framing, and Grand Challenges: How do individuals cope with emotional stress when working in extreme contexts?
10.15.-11.15amJohn Amis, Responding to the Homeless Crisis: Personal Drivers of Collective Action
11.30-12.30 Juliane Reinecke, title TBC
12.30-1.30 Open discussion: developing a research agenda
Conclusion of event
Fingerfood provided
The track address a major gap in our understanding – organising for resilience in contexts that are abnormal, exceptional, or extreme. This can involve the processes of anticipating, preparing for, responding to and learning from disruptive events in order to survive and prosper.
Our specific focus is on in extreme contexts where risks of severe physical, psychological harm or material consequences threaten the viability of an organisation and the safety and well-being of its organisational members. We will explore the theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions of the topic.
Track organizers: Professor David Denyer (Cranfield University); Professor Markus Hällgren (Umeå university); Professor Martina Linnenluecke (Macquarie University); Doctor Elmar Kutsch (Cranfield University); Dr Mark Hall (Birmingham University); Doctor Hugo Marynissen (Antwerp Management School)
We just received the happy news that the EGOS Standing Working Group on “Organizing in and for Extreme Contexts” was accepted! Starting in 2020, there will be (at least) four consecutive years with themes related to Extreme contexts! There was 99 supporters that responded to the request of support of the SWG. Without you this could not have happened! Thank you so much for the support to develop the research agenda even further! Hope to see you at a (EGOS) conference!! THANK YOU!!
Markus (Hällgren) on behalf of the organizing team; Anja Danner-Schröder, Mark de Rond, Samer Faraj, Daniel Geiger, Linda Rouleau, Kathleen Sutcliffe
A sub-plenary related to “institutional times and places” including Renate Meyer, Mark de Rond, Charlotte Karam and Marc Ventresca on various institutions and insights gained from Extreme contexts. The room was absolutely packed! Important insights related to theorizing and doing research in i.e. war situations.
Yesterday professor Mark de Rond´s book “Doctors at war” received the well-deserved EGOS 2018 book award. For you who have not read the book you find it here and a review here.