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Most complex engineering projects encounter unexpected events through their life cycle. These are traditionally attributed to inaccurate foresight and poor planning. Outlining a nonanticipatory alternate, the authors seek to explain the ability to rebound from unexpected events, without foresight, using resilient systems theory. This paper seeks to outline the theoretical underpinnings of project resilience and to identify criteria for planning and selecting projects for greater resilience.

Investigating project resilience, this paper studies the relationship between unexpected events and project performance in 21 projects. The authors perform a systematic review of project ex post evaluations 3–12 years after project completion.

First, the authors find that all projects encountered unexpected events, even when discounting planning error. Second, the authors show that, as a consequence, projects underperformed, not necessarily relative to formal criteria, but in terms of subjective opportunity cost, that is, relative to competing alternates – known or imagined – foregone by their implementation. Finally, the authors identify four types of resilient projects – superior, equivalent, compensatory and convertible projects – as opportunities for building project resilience.

The properties of resilient projects provide opportunities for building resilience in complex projects.

Departing from traditional efforts to “de risk” plans and “de-bias” planners, this paper focuses on the properties of projects themselves, as an alternate to improved foresight and up-front planning.

Despite the fact that both reserchers and managers agree that consumer satisfactions is a key factor for the success of hotels, little research has been done to reveal what aspects of the hotel operation the guests consider as important when evaluating the hotel experience. Literature on total quality management often argue that all aspects of the operation should be focused on, in order to achieve high levels of consumer satisfaction. Based on a sample of business travellers, we found that most of the variance in overall satisfaction with a hotel experience is eXplained by two core factors in the hotel operation, namely intangible aspects of the reception and tangible aspects of the houskeeping department. This calls for a more focused approach to the management of guest satisfaction than generally recommended in the literature. Implications for managers and recommendations for future research are presented.

In the present paper direct as well as indirect relationships between organizational changes and exposure to bullying at work are investigated. Interpersonal conflicts are hypothesized to mediate changes on bullying. Data from a sample of 2408 Norwegian employees confirmed that different organizational changes were moderately associated with task-related bullying at work, and that exposure to more changes increased the likelihood of being bullied. Structural equation modelling supported the assumption that changes were directly related to bullying. However, the hypothesis that changes were mediated on bullying through interpersonal conflicts was not supported. Results indicate that organizational changes and interpersonal conflicts are separate, and mainly independent, precursors of bullying at work.