The Exploration of the Soft Dimensions of Organizational Reliability in Public Organizations: A Qualitative Research

The high rate of environmental changes creates more difficult conditions for organizations and disrupts their performance. Therefore, the ability of organizations to maintain proper performance despite the crises has become important. One of the important issues in this regard is how to improve the reliability of organizations or the ability to maintain proper performance in crisis conditions. Organizational reliability has two hard and soft areas, the dimensions of which have been the focus of researchers for several decades, but less attention has been paid to the dimensions of the soft area. Hence, despite the wide scope of application and recent theoretical attention focused on the dimensions of the soft domain of organizational reliability, the dimensions and components of this type of reliability have not been identified in a way that can help its implementation in organizations. The current research was conducted with the aim of analyzing the soft dimensions of organizational reliability in public organizations. This research was done with a qualitative approach. The participants were managers and experts of six public organizations who had experience in crisis management and safety. The statistical population was sixteen and the sampling method was purposeful. Data collection tools were semi-structured interviews. Thematic analysis method was used to analyze the data. The findings show that the model of soft dimensions of organizational reliability includes human resources, organizational, knowledge, and human resource management capabilities. Moreover, the improvement in these capabilities helps the continuity of organizations' services in critical situations.