MODES OF ADJUSTMENT: THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO ORGANIZE FOR RESILIENCE

Despite growing concerns that unexpected events have become regular features of environments, we know little about organizing for resilience—the process by which leaders attempt to positively adjust operations to adversity. To address this gap, we conducted longitudinal case studies of eight U.S. health care organizations adjusting operations through successive phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. We discovered these adjustments demonstrated considerable variety during different phases of the pandemic, even when made by the same leaders in similar situations. We explain this variety through an inductively derived process model of organizing for resilience that traces how the enactment of different adverse situations leads to alternative modes of adjustment that target different resilience outcomes. In contrast to definitions that imply resilience entails both absorbing strain and preserving functioning, our study shows these, along with a third resilience outcome of anticipating and preparing for immanent threat, exist in three-way tension. Leaders must trade off one in pursuit of others. How leaders perceive the relative adversity of conditions and the alignment of organizational capabilities with those conditions shapes this trade-off and modes of adjustment made in pursuit of one, or at most a mix of two, of these three resilience outcomes.