Resilience culture : its enactment and role in crisis management

Abstract

 This dissertation seeks to develop the concept of “resilience culture” and examine how it could encourage employee-initiated crisis responding behaviors (EICRB), thereby facilitating organization’s recovery from crisis. Specifically, this dissertation addresses the following research questions: 1) In the face of crisis, what do EICRB involve? How to categorize them? 2) What does resilience culture involve? How to enact resilience culture in organizations? 3) How does resilience culture enactment relate to EICRB? 4) How does resilience culture enactment and EICRB relate to organization’s recovery speed from crisis? Based on the context of Muwu BBQ, a restaurant chain in China that has been recovering steadily from the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, this dissertation employes a mixed-method approach to build, elaborate, and test theories on how the enactment of resilience culture relates to EICRB and organization’s recovery from crisis. My main argument is that by enacting resilience culture – a culture that enables employees to perceive their own resilience, believe that they can change, make progress, and grow, organizations can encourage EICRB through enhancing employees’ organizational identification, helping them set goals, developing their capability, and increasing proactivity; EICRB plays an important role in facilitating organization’s recovery from crisis. While I found supportive evidence from qualitative interview data, analyses of quantitative data failed to support some of my hypotheses, which could be caused by several limitations of the quantitative data. Quantitative analysis indeed yields some insightful findings. Consistent with theory, our quantitative analysis results suggest enhancing store leadership and increasing information transparency are helpful for stores to survive and recover in crisis. Interestingly, the store may get hurt by giving employees too much time for self-learning, the store thus should be careful with learning encouragement when enacting resilient culture. Nevertheless, this dissertation contributes theoretically to literatures on organization resilience, organization culture, and crisis management. It also provides important practical implications to organizational leaders and employees as they navigate crises.