Building Resilience in Temporary Organizations: Lessons from a Shipyard

This chapter discusses the organizational and occupational dimensions of resilience in temporary organizing contexts and how these contribute to sustained reliable performance. When dealing with issues related to high levels of safety in complex settings, longstanding organizations with strong organizational routines are often described as the most appropriate forms of organizing. However, temporary forms of organizing are developing and little is known on how actors engaged in such contexts can enhance and sustain resilience when facing uncertainty in safety-critical contexts. This chapter addresses this gap in the literature by demonstrating that temporary organizations, such as project-based ones, can also deal with major safety issues, and that temporary forms of organizing can help complex projects to be efficiently and safely carried out. We examine this proposition by studying the case of an inter-organizational and safety-critical project: the construction by a shipyard of a series of ships. Looking at the meso-level, i.e. the occupational groups involved in the project, we show how temporary forms of organizing and occupational groups together contribute to the resilience of the whole project. We highlight that the ability of the project to coordinate temporary organizing forms is key in achieving (safe) performance.