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In the past decade, firms have become more aware of supply chain disruptions and their impact on the firm. Developing a supply chain resilience organizational culture has been proposed as an effective way to manage supply chain risks. This study intends to explore how the geographical location risks impact the decision to develop a supply chain resilience strategy, in particular, to anticipate the disruption proactively and have a business continuity plan in place. Using a unique database including thousands of manufacturing locations that belong to over 7,000 firms across 102 countries, we test three hypotheses to understand if geographical location risks, frequency of disruptive events, and the region in which a site is located are factors for the likelihood of a firm having a business continuity plan at their locations. The study also seeks to understand if there are regional effects and firm effects affecting the decision to develop resilience. With a particular focus in Latin America and the firms with a manufacturing presence in that region. The main findings of the study are that natural disaster risks do tend to develop a culture of resilience, while macroeconomic risks tend to do the opposite. These results remain stable for firms' effects. The Latin America region shows no observable statistical difference in developing resilience compared to the Asia region. While the Northern America region shows more resilience compared to Asia. We conclude that economic risk is less predictable and harder to develop a plan for than disruptions, such as natural disasters. The findings of this study present an opportunity for governments to develop resilience plans that can make their countries more attractive for investment to multinational firms looking to establish new manufacturing locations around the world.

This chapter examines the key issues around organisational resilience – what it means for organisations, and the key elements they need to consider if they are looking to increase the ability of their operations to withstand challenges in their environment. Organisations have always had to adapt to changes in their environment, whether as a result of market-based, political, regulatory or technological developments. However, the pace of change and the number and frequency of external shocks, such as the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 epidemic, war and increasing nationalism, inflation, labour shortages, cyber-security threats and environmental crises have increased over recent years. Whilst some of these events could have been foreseen, in that they emerge relatively slowly, such as increasing nationalism, other crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic could not have been readily anticipated, both for the speed at which it occurred, but the significant impact it had on people and organisations. Clearly, many of these events can have severe consequences not only for society but also for organisations, potentially threatening their survival. Hence organisations are increasingly recognising the need to be both more aware of potential threats or even opportunities by constantly monitoring their environment, but also creating contingency or mitigation plans to become more resilient to such change and shocks. By becoming more aware of changes in their environment and incorporating risk evaluations and mitigation plans into strategy and regular business planning cycles, organisations can become more adaptive and agile to respond more quickly and robustly to such events. Whilst it is not possible to fully mitigate all risks to the organisation, increased resilience can reduce the severity or longevity of negative impacts or support the organisation to seek opportunities from change.

This chapter introduces the concept of overall organisational resilience, and then discusses some more functional areas of resilience: operational, financial, technological, reputational and institutional. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the effects of building greater organisational resilience and what organisations should consider when evaluating where to start on such a journey.

Urban resilience is a fairly new but rapidly emerging area of interest. Academia as well as the professional and practitioner communities are increasingly engaged in understanding the characteristics of resilience in complex urban issues. The year 2007–2008 was a historical milestone in human history for two reasons. First, the percentage of urban population to total population in the world touched 50 percent; second, the works of climate scientists were recognized as being so significant that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2007. Both events are closely associated with and provide special impetus to further research into and understanding of urban resilience, which this chapter discusses further in the following sections.

There are several ways that risks and uncertainties might be discussed in the context of assessment and analysis – several of which could be inferred from previous chapters. Here, Chapters 6 and 7 are structured around what might be called strategic risks/uncertainties and operational risks/uncertainties.

This chapter presents the strategic risk/uncertainty assessment and analysis challenge. Most current thinking on risk management – enterprise risk management (ERM), but even including more traditional approaches – place expectations on leaders and top managers to provide guidance on risk policy, but also require those individuals to understand the challenges for which they are responsible. As implied previously, this domain mainly consists of uncertainties. Typically, top managers deal with aggregated operational data that – in itself – might be measurable but owing to the effects of consolidation tend to present leaders with a singular strategy/issue that is unique to the organisation and therefore not well-suited to statistical analysis. Furthermore, scanning for future threats and opportunities is decidedly a matter of considering the unknown, the emergent, and even the unimaginable. Within this assortment of challenges are the very large-scale features that – among many things – compel consideration of collaboration with other organisations. Here these special risks/uncertainties are labelled global risks.

The issue of complexity is here revisited, and this discussion serves two particular purposes. Complexity theory (and complex adaptive systems) offers some insights into methods of assessment and analysis, but they also provide some useful views on the nature of the uncertainty field in the context of complex environments. This discussion will offer some consideration of traditional, ERM, and alternative approaches and the appropriate ‘fit’ of assessment and analysis into these frameworks.

This chapter examines the implications of resilience for contemporary work life. Consistent with current research, we propose that resilience will be associated with work-related attitudes and behaviors via its linkages with positive emotion (Avey, Wernsing, & Luthans, 2008). Further, building on calls to identify the mechanisms underlying resilience, we present an input-process-output (IPO) model of resilience and describe how a variety of individual differences – including those related to the regulation of negative emotional experience – can contribute to a better understanding of the processes involved in maintaining psychological and physical well-being following adversity. We conclude our work by outlining various risk-prevention and asset-focused strategies that may be useful for developing resilience in workplace settings.

Climate change is happening now. Climate-induced disasters are occurring in the Asia Pacific region, where a distinctly increasing trend has been observed in recent decades. This shows that the region is the most disaster prone, compared with other parts of the world. Studies on the causes of disaster in many affected regions suggest that in a typical disaster, cities with high population density see increases in mortality and number of people affected. Increased economic losses within the region are also inevitable. In most Asian countries, 65–90% of economic activities are concentrated in urban areas. Estimates indicate that two out of three people on the earth will live in urban areas by the year 2030. Unless appropriate measures are taken in these urban communities, disaster incidents will continue to increase. Urban communities are a main player to confront this increasing trend of climate-induced disasters.

The environmental exposures to humankind have increased in number and intensity over past decades introducing the possibility of extreme incidents with irreversible impacts on business and society. The global integration of business and cross-border financial flows supported by digital technology increase the complexity and uncertainty of the business environment. In this context, the behaviors of individual players are interdependent with potentially nonlinear and unpredictable outcomes ascribed to complex wicked problems. As a consequence, organizational decision-makers may pursue false objectives from misinformed causation where stringent score-card controls will exacerbate the problems. The resolution to wicked problems requires cross-functional and collective interactions supported by a collaborative corporate mindset. The conventional control-based management practices fall short in dealing with disruptive developments where value-based stakeholder collaboration can provide resilient responses to unexpected abrupt events.

In this chapter, the authors present a conceptual perspective on resilience that is grounded in self-regulation theory, to help address theoretical, empirical, and practical concerns in this domain. Despite the growing popularity of resilience research (see Linnenluecke, 2017), scholars have noted ongoing concerns about conceptual confusion and resulting, paradoxical, stigmatization associated with the label “resilience” (e.g., Adler, 2013; Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, & Klieger, 2016; Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000). The authors seek to advance this domain via presenting a clarified, theoretically grounded conceptualization that can facilitate unified theoretical advancements, aligned operationalization, research model development, and intervention improvements. Resilience is defined here as continued, self-regulated goal striving (e.g., behavioral and/or psychological) despite adversity (i.e., after goal frustration). This self-regulatory conceptualization of resilience offers theoretically based definitions for the necessary conditions (i.e., adversity and overcoming) and outlines specific characteristics (i.e., unit-centered and dynamic) of resilience, distinguishes resilience from other persistence-related concepts (e.g., grit and hardiness), and provides a framework for understanding the connections (and distinctions) between resilience, performance, and well-being. After presenting this self-regulatory resilience perspective, the authors outline additional paths forward for the domain.

The global environments that surround contemporary business activities are uncertain, fast-changing, and frequently exposed to abrupt unexpected events with the potential to inflict extreme impacts where the ability to respond and adapt the organization effectively becomes a primary strategic concern. However, various firms that operate across diverse industry contexts approach this adaptive challenge in distinct ways that lead to quite diverse outcomes with many negative performers and some high performers with positive risk features. The heterogeneous approaches appear to consistently form extreme left-tailed performance distributions with inverse risk-return features but we are not really able to explain why and how these regularly observed phenomena come about. Hence, we want to study these organizational artifacts by collecting an extensive updated dataset to test the proposed relationships, explore alternative explanations, and learn from the extreme exemplars often referred to as outliers. There are extensive literatures in (strategic) management and finance that have dealt with the distribution of firm returns from slightly different angles but with some emerging commonalities that can inspire further analyses of the performance data. As a precursor for this, we discuss the odds of effective strategic adaptation in complex dynamic environments and introduce resilience as a proper outcome when simple solutions are scarce, and consider conditions that may facilitate these aims. The premises for the ensuing analyses are laid out and the main contents of the following chapters are presented.