Aligning Organizational Pathologies and Organizational Resilience Indicators

Abstract

Developing resilient individuals, organizations and communities is a hot topic in the research agenda in Management, Ecology, Psychology or Engineering. Despite the number of works that focus on resilience is increasing, there is not completely agreed definition of resilience, neither an entirely formal and accepted framework. The cause may be the spread of research among different fields. In this paper, we focus on the study of organizational resilience with the aim of improving the level of resilience in organizations. We review the relation between viable and resilient organizations and their common properties. Based on these common properties, we defend the application of the Viable System Model (VSM) to design resilient organizations. We also identify the organizational pathologies defined applying the VSM through resilience indicators. We conclude that an organization with any organizational pathology is not likely to be resilient because it does not fulfill the requirements of viable organizations.

Keywords

• Organizational Resilience
• Viable System Model
• Organizational Pathologies