Organizational Resilience and the Role of Leaders

Increasingly, organizations have become vulnerable to significant changes and crises, either global or local. Disruptive events and crises can cause uncertainty for the general population and organizations’ leaders, employees and teams, and impact organizations’ successful functioning. Some crises can be significant events requiring immediate action, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic, economic recessions, natural disasters, political instability, or war. These events are mentally and physically challenging for the general population, and have increased the demand for disability and social support. Other events, while not as extreme, include political and government policy changes, which disrupt organizations’ usual operations and risk their stability, whether for-profit, nonprofit, or governments. Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS or the Scheme), the largest and most significant and important government social policy change in Australian history, significantly transformed the provision of disability services, and impacted both disability service providers and people with disability. Successfully managing these substantial changes, remaining viable and continuing to deliver needed services, requires disability services organizations, their leaders, and staff to be resilient. This chapter explains the NDIS and its consequences, before expounding on resilience theory and characteristics. As resilient leaders are key to developing an organization’s and its people’s resilience, this chapter discusses factors enabling leaders’ own resilience.