Linking employee attributes and organizational resilience: An empirically driven model

Abstract

Extant research highlights how resilient organizations effectively cope with supply chain disruptions to enhance firm performance. Yet, it remains unclear how an organization's most basic resource—that is, its individual employees—facilitates such resilience. Through a qualitative study that includes 44 interviews across four manufacturing companies, we identify critical individual attributes and show how these attributes contribute to organizational resilience. Our findings advance a framework of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral attributes through which employees facilitate resilient outcomes. Our empirically driven model enriches theory about resilience within the supply chain management domain and elevates the importance of managerial approaches associated with human resource management activities, which affect organizations' repositories of the employee attributes that foster resilience.