Strategic Resilience: A systematic review of leading literature

Abstract

Topicality: The concepts of resilience, organizational resilience, and strategic resilience in management science have been gaining more and more attention in recent years. Strategic resilience, in general, can be understood as the capability to turn threats into opportunities. The overarching concept of organizational resilience describes the capability to respond to changes or adversity; however, the concept of strategic resilience is still underrepresented in research and not clearly distinguished within organizational resilience.

The research aim: This paper aims to conduct a systematic literature review to develop a shared understanding of the concept of strategic resilience in business and management research. Furthermore, a future research agenda is provided from these findings.

Methodology: The review examines the leading publications with the search term ‘strategic resilience’ in the ScienceDirect and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) databases with a Boolean search. In total, 73 publications across 45 publication sources from 1979 to 2021 are used.

Findings: Research on the resilience of companies and systems seems to trend upwards. Publications are concentrated primarily in journals with an environmental or sustainable background. The publications view resilience in terms of the cause of resilience, fields where resilience is applied, or the concept of resilience and strategic management itself.

Novelty: Analyzing the existing research shows that strategic resilience can prepare a response to unforeseeable challenges or opportunities in a company by pursuing an ambidextrous organization that exploits operational resilience and explores strategic resilience to build organizational resilience.

Paper classification: literature review