Organizational resilience in the face of disruptive forces: a model for building robustness of firms in financial services sector

Abstract

Highly dynamic and turbulent business environments of today demand almost all the organizations in the world to be more resilient than ever before. Resilience has become the new buzzword in today’s world, with the advent of various disruptive forces and suddenly emerged pandemics, such as COVID-19. Among the industrial sectors that are destined to be under the pressure of those disruptions, health services sector and financial services sector are of utmost importance. Therefore, organizations need to be more robust or resilient and in order to do so, they have to formulate appropriate corporate and business strategies after identifying the drivers or sources contributing towards the emergence of the resilience in an organizational context. Based on the prevailing theoretical underpinnings from prior literature sources, this paper proposes a conceptual framework to further understand the antecedents of organizational resilience in order to enhance the overall business performance of the firms in the financial services industry in Sri Lanka. In this conceptual model, sources of organizational resilience are classified as resilient leadership, resilient organizational culture, adaptation capacity, organizational capacity and managerial capabilities. The proposed organizational resilience conceptual framework will also pave the way for various theoretical and empirical implications.