Quantifying Resilience in the Workplace

Organizations draw on standardized measurement systems to quantify their financial performance and to ensure operational continuity. Through the quantitative information provided by these systems, managers seek to get a sense of the organization’s resilience—its capacity to overcome adversity and crisis. However, these attempts at quantifying organizational resilience may be problematic because many of the resources, which can potentially be mobilized in times of crisis, cannot be identified, let alone be quantified. Therefore, despite the considerable costs involved with such attempts to quantify organizational resilience, their functionality is not well understood. Managerial “wishful thinking” notwithstanding, the question is whether organizations should perhaps resist the urge to attempt to quantify many aspects of their resilience. Recognizing the complexities involved with balancing the trade-offs associated with quantifying resilience, this chapter takes stock of the multiple forms of resilience and the challenges associated with quantifying these forms of resilience. By developing a comprehensive understanding of resilience in its various forms, we make resilience and its measurements available for further study. Furthermore, the chapter highlights the pitfalls that present-day measurement systems present, providing insight into the feasibility of measuring resilience. Through these contributions, we ultimately argue that quantifying resilience through standardized measurement systems is highly problematic because of discrepancies between the nature of resilience and the quantifications that these systems can deliver.