From Bouncing Back to Bouncing Forward: A Temporal Trajectory Model of Organizational Resilience

Resilience research has extensively addressed how organizations cope with disruptive events and their immediate impact. The focus of this research has been on how organizations “bounce back” to a pre-disruption state. However, organizations are also challenged to “bounce forward” toward unprecedented and uncertain futures in the wake of disruptive events without losing sight of their pasts. In this article, we develop a trajectory model of organizational resilience that focuses on how actors project temporal trajectories of responses toward disruptive events, reconstitute the trajectories in immediate response to the event, and reconfigure the trajectories toward the ensuing future. The model addresses the need to distinguish combinations of probability and the impact of disruptive events in organizational resilience research. We develop a typology of types of disruptive events from ecological research representing a distinct combination of probability and impact, labeled stochastic events, probabilistic transformations, and tipping points. We examine critical transitions in the trajectory model at which organizational resilience may or may not materialize. We conclude by considering the implications for theorizing organizational resilience between organizational levels and between different disruptive events, and for temporal organizational theorizing.