Organizational Resilience and Inter-Organizational Relationships: An Exploration of Chinese Business-Service Firms

Much research on organizational resilience has focused on the intra-organizational capacity that enables positive adjustment to disruption. Yet, when seen as open systems, organizations are highly interdependent and interconnected with many other actors. This raises the question of how inter-organizational relationships (IORs) affect organizational resilience. We explore this using a novel inductive two-stage approach incorporating Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping to identify the relational determinants of organizational resilience in the context of Chinese business-service firms. Using this technique reveals five relational dimensions which we label: relational competence, innovative assimilation, integrative trustworthiness, identity constraints, and asymmetry. The analysis also shows how these inter-relate to either positively or negatively affect organizational resilience. This is a new way for understanding organizational resilience and shows how it is determined by a complex interplay between IOR attributes in the external relational environment of the organization.