Building organizational resilience potential: an adaptive strategy for operational continuity in crisis

Abstract

There are questions as to whether a causal relationship exists between disaster planning and effective adaptative behaviors in crisis. Traditional planning has viewed the contigency plan as an outcome of a process to be utilized in a step-by-step fashion during a crisis. This dissertation challenges this orthodox view and suggest a new paradign, one that focuses on creating organizational structures and processes that build organizational resilience potential. The purpose of this research is to theoretically and empirically connect the concept of hight reliability organizational theory to a study of how one organized planning approach - continuity of operations planning - may help build latent resilience in organizations.