Prioritizing the thirteenth dimensions of Organizational Resilience in dealing with crises and major accidents

Organizations are defined as a group with a specific structure and play an important role in the social, economic, and ecological systems. Disasters, accidents, and crises are complex and controversial issues for industries and organizations. Accidents and occupational injuries cause severe and significant economic losses in developing countries and result in the loss of millions of working days per year. With increasing disaster statistics in world, the ability to survive and thrive in turbulent times, such as recessions, disasters, crises, and wars, is a major concern for organizations and industries over the recent decade. Organizations must manage crises such as recessions, large-scale defective production, supply chain failures, major industrial accidents, and employee problems. The system should be designed in such a way which based on the results of past organizational disasters use a method to prevent and minimize accidents and their losses. Resilience in these types of events and crises is often less pronounced and manifested through an organizational culture. Organizational resilience is an effective objective that constantly contributes to the organizationchr('39')s performance during business, disasters and critical situations. In other words, resilience enables organizations to manage complex challenges in the organization. To create resilience, organizations need to be consistent and highly reliable. Resilience is defined as the ability of a system to recover after an emergency. According to the resilience model presented, thirteen dimensions of organizational resilience include leadership, employee engagement, situational awareness, decision making, innovation and creativity, effective participation, knowledge utilization, organizational island failure, internal resources, goal unity, inactivity status, planning strategies and stress testing programs. Considering the importance of organizational factors and the criticality of large industries, appropriate and important dimensions and areas for measuring corporate resilience should be identified. Then, by weighing and prioritizing the identified dimensions, useful information should be provided to managers and decision makers of organizations. Managers will use this information in planning to reduce risk and increase safety and resilience of organizations. In previous studies, 13 dimensions of organizational resilience were not combined and their weighting was not performed. Therefore, this study aimed to weight and prioritizes the 13 dimensions of organizational resilience in the face of major crises and major events in large industries.

The present study is a descriptive-analytical-applied study conducted in large industries (in three major industries including: a heavy machinery manufacturing company, a car parts manufacturing and assembly company, and a petroleum industry) is done. In the first step, the concept of organizational resilience and its dimensions were examined through a review of previous studies and opinion of the relevant experts in the subject. An extensive study was conducted to examine the literature. Therefore, the literature on organizational resilience including theses, conferences, and papers published between 2000 and 2019 was reviewed. After the initial screening, which included reviewing titles and eliminating duplicate and unrelated cases, a determined number of articles, abstracts and dissertations were reviewed. Accordingly, many article full texts were prepared to evaluate the dimensions, the methods and tools of the studies, the gaps and weaknesses of the studies, as well as the identified indicators and factors affecting resilience. After reviewing the literature and indicators extracted by the research team, 13 important and relevant resilience indicators were selected to design the tool, namely: management commitment, just culture, learning culture, knowledge of status, preparedness, use of knowledge and experience, communication and teamwork, creativity and innovation, leadership and decision making, planning and targeting strategy, effective participation, resources and responsibility.In the second step of the present study, the panel of experts was selected. Members of the panel of experts were selected based on cognitive criteria and scientific qualifications from experts in crisis management, occupational health and ergonomics. The final list consisted of 11 specialists (persons with relevant Ph.D. degree and one year of relevant work experience) in this field.In the third step of the study, the identified dimensions and domains for measuring the level of organizational resilience were provided to experts in the form of a paired comparative questionnaire (AHP questionnaire). They then presented their comments on pairwise comparisons between dimensions and between items of each organizational resilience questionnaire. It should be noted that for the representation of the pairwise comparisons matrix, a 9-Saati scale was used to determine the relative importance of each dimension in relation to others. After collecting the questionnaires, weighting of dimensions and organizational resilience scales were performed using AHP method and Super Decisions software.

The highest value of normal weight among dimensions of organizational resilience was related to leadership and decision making (0. 20583) and the least was related to resources (0.01246). In other words, the first and thirteenth priority among the 13 organizational resilience dimensions in this study are related to leadership and decision making dimensions and resources, respectively. It is worth mentioning that the areas of  knowledge and experience utilization and management commitment along with the leadership and decision making dimension have the relatively high weight (weight difference over the other ten areas of the questionnaire) and the dimensions of preparedness and responsibility and resources have relatively less weight. It is also worth noting that the inconsistency rate (0.0138) was less than or equal to 0.1 which is indicating the validity of the pairwise comparisons and thus the results of the weights can be trusted. Also, considering the results related to weighting the items related to each of the dimensions of the organizational resilience questionnaire (to show the importance of the items specific to each domain of the organizational resilience questionnaire, it can be stated that all the obtained incompatibility rates were less than or equal to 0.1. As a result, it can be said that the pairwise comparisons are correct and that the weights assigned to all the items can be trusted. 

Given the importance of organizational resilience and the criticality of the industries under study, appropriate dimensions and indicators should be identified to measure organizational resilience. Then by providing weighting and prioritizing indicators and areas of organizational resilience, useful information is provided to managers and decision makers and it can be used in planning to reduce risk and increase the level of safety and resilience of the organization. In other words, critical industries and organizations (characterized by high complexity and vulnerability and susceptible to major disasters) can focus on priority-influenced indicators to improve safety and resilience management. Modifying and improving effective performance indicators will improve the safety and resilience of the organization. According to the findings of the research, leadership and decision-making dimensions, the use of knowledge and experience and the management commitment are more effective than other components in organizational resilience. Therefore, it is necessary to make arrangements for organizations to become more familiar with the issues and benefits of safety and resilience and to rely on the support and commitment of managers as well as the knowledge and experience of employees to make the right decisions. These dimensions must be taken into consideration when developing measures to improve organizational resilience.The behaviors of managers in any organization, which should take the lead and make decisions, influence the thoughts, feelings, and desires of their supervised employees, which motivate and guide their behavior. Therefore, leadership and decision-making style as a facilitator and motivator have a direct and indirect impact on the efficiency of organizations as well as on the creation of organizational culture and safety culture. The results also showed that the dimensions of knowledge utilization, experience and management commitment were more relative to leadership and decision making. This important finding highlights the importance of these two dimensions in helping to promote organizational culture and thereby enhancing the level of organizational resilience.The results also indicated that among the 13 dimensions of organizational resilience, resource dimension is the top priority in terms of importance and weight gained. Whereas from the expert panelchr('39')s perspective, the concept of resources refers more to the financial resources and equipment in the organization and the impact of human resources (managers and employees) is more represented in other areas of organizational resilience. Therefore, with this perspective, the levels of personal, safety and organization culture due to the lack of staff involvement in resources is reduced.