Abstract

Firms need resilience to help them get rid of failures or crises when facing emergency, yet—surprisingly—the issue of how to activate and develop organizational resilience has not been effectively addressed. Underpinned by configuration thinking, this study uses the fsQCA method to reveal the coordination and causal complexity between the six conditions that promote or inhibit the formation of organizational resilience. Specifically, the cognitive level includes manager self-efficacy and mindful organizing; the behavioral level includes exploratory innovation and exploitative innovation; the contextual reinforcement level includes bonding social capital and bridging social capital. Using survey data from 155 firms in China, the study found that: (1) Single antecedent condition is difficult to form high organizational resilience, but the lack of bonding social capital is a necessary condition for generating non-high organizational resilience. (2) Among the different configurations of six conditions, there are four pathways to form high organizational resilience, which can be specifically classified into three modes: Exploration, Ambidextrous, and Defensive configuration. (3) Three formation pathways for non-high organizational resilience, and there is an asymmetric causal relationship with high organizational resilience. The findings enrich the theory of crisis management and organizational resilience and provide a valuable reference for enterprises to effectively stimulate organizational resilience to respond to emergencies.