Routines of Resilience: How Organizational Routines Shape Enterprise Response to Societal Disruptions

In this study, we adopt the lens of routines, a core construct in the theory of organizations through which to view how enterprises respond to societal disruptions. Organizational routines refer to the established, repetitive patterns of activity performed by groups and individuals within an organization. Examples include standard operating procedures, patterns of communication and coordination, and distinctive decision protocols. Informed by the lens of routines, we investigate a significant adaptation triggered by the global COVID-19 pandemic, arguably one of the most consequential disruptions in the recent past: hybrid work. We propose that hybrid work—where employees alternate between remote and in-person work arrangements—represents a fundamental transformation in organizational work routines. Simultaneously, however, there is significant variation in its retention—some firms institutionalized hybrid work as a durable routine, while others reverted to pre-pandemic, on-site models. To investigate this variation, we adopted an empirically grounded quantitative discovery approach—specifically, an abductive design using archival data—to examine how organizational work routines change and persist in response to external events. We suggest that the persistence of new routines that emerge in response to societal disruptions is shaped by internal organizational characteristics, especially the information processing capacities that shape how firms interpret and respond to external events.