Analysis of the factors influencing the ability of organizational communities to absorb environmental changes.

Abstract

Disruptive changes in the environment of organizations have been identified as having a major influence on widespread organizational change. Thus far, existing research focused primarily on identifying the specific trigger that caused organizational communities to change. However, the effects of triggering events are often specific to a particular industry or situation. As a result, it often remains unclear why similar environmental changes did not trigger similar changes before or in other industries. Similarly, in ecology, some ecological systems display greater vulnerability to environmental change than others. These observations led some ecologist to adopt the resilience of a system as a main research topic. Resilience characterizes the capacity of a system to maintain itself despite environmental changes. In this paper, the resilience approach is applied in order to find out which factors cause some organizational communities to display greater vulnerability to disruptive change than others. In a systematic literature review, twenty peer-reviewed articles that included an empirical study or case study of widespread organizational change, were analysed. The results revealed thirteen relevant factors that had an influence on resilience and an inverted U-shaped relationship between maturity of the industry and the degree of resilience was found. Young and dynamic industries showed a low resilience, but also mature and inert industries revealed a low resilience in the face of environmental changes.