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Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

Evidence suggests that corporate entrepreneurship (CE), namely, innovativeness, risk-taking and corporate venturing, enhances a firm’s performance. However, the study of CE in developing markets – particularly in Egypt – is still new and undeveloped. The literature stresses the importance of incorporating environmental factors into the study of CE. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between CE, environmental jolts (unexpected abrupt environmental events such as the Arab Spring) and the firm’s financial performance. Based on the periods before and after the series of anti-government protests known as the Arab Spring, this paper argues that after an environmental jolt, CE will negatively affect financial performance.

This study analyzes and correlates CE, environmental jolts and firm performance in Egypt for a period over 10 years (from 2007 through 2016) using a sample of 94 manufacturing firms listed on the Egyptian Stock Exchange. Data were manually collected through archival/secondary data using financial and accounting information from the annual reports released by the firms. These reports were downloaded from the firms’ webpages and the Egyptian Exchange website.

The main results of this paper indicate that environmental factors play a role in the effect of CE on firm performance. Using the 2011 Arab Spring as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper finds that CE’s effect on firm performance is higher pre-jolt and lower post-jolt.

This study provides useful implications for managers and practitioners. Firms need to find new ways of allocating their resources to help provide innovative products and to have a competitive advantage. Although innovation, risk-taking and corporate venturing may have a delayed impact on a firm’s financial performance, managers should evaluate the implications and the success of CE activities in the long-term, not from a short-term perspective.

Building upon the existing literature, this is the first paper to investigate the effect of CE on a firm’s financial performance in Egypt during the Arab Spring. The manufacturing firms listed on the Egyptian Exchange were analyzed in a quasi-natural experiment, taking into account the moderating role of an environmental jolt, namely, the Arab Spring.

Sudden crises, known as environmental jolts, can cripple unprepared organizations. In recent years, financial jolts have led many organizations, particularly government organizations, to respond by furloughing employees. Furloughs can engender various responses in employees that can lead to negative work outcomes for both the employees and the organization. Previous research shows that the implementation of strategic human resource management (SHRM) practices, such as commitment-based systems, can mitigate the negative effects of environmental jolts. Utilizing the knowledge-based view and affective events theory, we propose a multilevel model where SHRM practices moderate employee affective responses to furloughs, which, in turn, drive subsequent employee behavioral outcomes.

This paper aims to examine the effects of 9/11/2001 on strategic variability in the US air carrier industry. The paper also seeks to examine the role of firm size in these relationships.

The paper tests two different perspectives on organizational adaptation to environmental jolts: the punctuated equilibrium model and institutional isomorphism. The two counter hypotheses predict either increasing or decreasing variability in strategic response to 9/11, respectively. This is a longitudinal study of the US air carrier industry. The sample includes the major, national, and large regional air carriers in the US from 1979 (post‐deregulation) to 2008. The data come from archival sources. The study includes measures of variability in differentiation and low cost strategies as well as scope.

Time series regressions examine the effects of the 9/11 jolt on business strategy variability in the majors, nationals, and large regionals. The results lend some support to both perspectives on organizational adaptation. Air carrier size had a significant relationship to strategic variability.

The paper studies the behavior of firms in the US air carrier industry following the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001. It examines two different theoretical approaches to environmental jolts and should provide useful information to both academics and managers who are interested in the effects of significant environmental changes on the behavior of an industry.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships of supply chain resilience (SCR) and absorptive capacity (ACAP) with firm performance by specifically examining the crisis-mitigating effects under an environmental jolt such as COVID-19.

This paper is based on data from a questionnaire survey among Danish manufacturing and transport and logistics companies with 174 respondents.

While the adaptive capabilities associated with both SCR and ACAP are well recognized in extant SCM literature, less is known about their boundary conditions. Examining the functioning of SCR and ACAP amid the COVID-19 crisis, this study finds that both SCR and ACAP related positively to firm performance. However, while the positive relationship between SCR and firm performance was partly mediated by better crisis-mitigation, the results of this study did not find that a similar mechanism was present for ACAP. These results suggest notable refinements of current understandings of SCR and ACAP.

This study is limited by the cross-sectional design, the focus on Danish companies only, and by examining only two industries. Hence, comparisons to other countries and other industries would be of significant interest.

Investing in SCR and ACAP to different extents provides for a complementary mix of longer-term opportunity-generating dynamic capabilities and more short-term crisis-mitigating dynamic capabilities. Firms will benefit from both types of dynamic capabilities during a crisis, but the latter will be more important for mitigating specific crisis impacts.

This paper extends current theorizing on ACAP and SCR by adding the distinction between the long-term opportunity generating dynamic capabilities and short-term crisis-mitigating dynamic capabilities. This paper provides novelty by empirically examining this theorizing by investigating the performance- and crisis-mitigating effect of SCR and ACAP in the light of the COVID-19 crisis.

This paper aims to deepen the understanding of strategic learning through the lens of environmental jolts.

Strategic learning is explained from the three paradigms of organizational learning.

Organizational learning provides a firm foundation to develop and elaborate the concept of strategic learning that can help organizations gain competitive advantage and adaptive capability.

Alan Meyer’s environmental jolt model is meaningful in that it is derived from stimulus–response model, which still explains important aspects of strategic learning.

Embedding a strategic learning capability will help organizations development fit with external environments.

This paper enlightens strategic learning as a Model II learning at the system level from a stimulus-response mechanism and opens up new possibilities of incorporating higher-order capability.

Health care organizations are accustomed to rapid and often discontinuous environmental change. Even when contemplating large scale change including the decisions to merge or integrate operations, health care managers can draw upon the expertise and advise of peers who have gone through similar experiences. However a bioterror event is a class of change that represents something totally unplanned and for which the industry has little or no experience in confronting. The objective for health care organizations is to mitigate the effects of this type of an event. Specific ideas for taking systems oriented, network-centric approach to disaster planning are provided.

The design of the Advanced Combat Helmet (ACH) currently in use was optimized by its designers in order to attain maximum protection against ballistic impacts (fragments, shrapnel, etc.) and hard-surface/head collisions. Since traumatic brain injury experienced by a significant fraction of the soldiers returning from the recent conflicts is associated with their exposure to blast, the ACH should be redesigned in order to provide the necessary level of protection against blast loads. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In the present work, an augmentation of the ACH for improved blast protection is considered. This augmentation includes the use of a polyurea (a nano-segregated elastomeric copolymer) based ACH external coating. To demonstrate the efficacy of this approach, blast experiments are carried out on instrumented head-mannequins (without protection, protected using a standard ACH, and protected using an ACH augmented by a polyurea explosive-resistant coating (ERC)). These experimental efforts are complemented with the appropriate combined Eulerian/Lagrangian transient non-linear dynamics computational fluid/solid interaction finite-element analysis.

The results obtained clearly demonstrated that the use of an ERC on an ACH affects (generally in a beneficial way) head-mannequin dynamic loading and kinematic response as quantified by the intracranial pressure, impulse, acceleration and jolt.

To the authors’ knowledge, the present work is the first reported combined experimental/computational study of the blast-protection efficacy and the mild traumatic brain-injury mitigation potential of polyurea when used as an external coating on a helmet.

When modeling environmental jolts from terrorist attacks, various aspects should be analyzed in order to properly present an accurate configuration. The following article discusses how asymmetrical warfare has an impact on the outcomes of a terrorist attack. The several dimensions of terrorist attacks can be extracted to deduce the ways that asymmetrical warfare can damage the health care system. The article will relate real life terrorist attacks and hypothetical scenarios to better inform the reader about the weak attacking the strong, and then explain how this relates to health care providers.

This study aims to offer a value chain (real options) approach for reducing uncertainty exposure by pursuing a global frictionless trade ethos almost exclusively. Jolts of significant proportion, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic and corresponding reshoring phenomena observed in Mexico and Central America, enhance the topic’s relevance.

This conceptual study sheds light on heightened systemic uncertainty because of extreme events; proposes a mitigation protocol rooted in real options (ROs); and prescribes incentivizing regional value chains through public–private partnerships (PPPs).

This study identifies a systemic multinational enterprise (MNE) response aimed at mitigating the repercussions of the most recent jolt of significant worldwide proportions and suggests developing regional value chains through PPPs. In doing so, the authors recognize an incipient MNE trend toward nearshoring and backshoring to achieve this end. This phenomenon is relatively underdeveloped in Europe, where fewer than 4% of firms have engaged in backshoring activities, even in the three-millennia-old Basque region. In contrast, last year’s backshoring of global value chains (GVCs) in Mexico and Central America was noticeable.

This study is among the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to explore the nearshoring phenomenon as a response mechanism, and it opens avenues for finding better ways to mitigate worldwide uncertainties and exposure to extreme events.

This model would benefit MNEs and governments by keeping their operations running as close to capacity as possible, even when external jolts cause a partial or total system shutdown of MNEs’ GVCs. The proposed solution, namely, PPPs, can achieve these objectives through real options.

A social benefit of the regionalization of MNEs’ GVCs would be helping to resolve societal grand challenges, including lowering their global carbon footprint and reducing poverty. This is because having a regional supply facility close to their home market would not only lead to cost reductions for MNEs but also allow them to conduct more on-site quality control checks.

The regional real options concept offers an excellent opportunity for practitioners and governments to improve MNEs’ success via the mitigation of uncertainties and, concomitantly, the lives of billions of people.

El presente estudio ofrece un enfoque de cadena de valor (opciones reales) para reducir la exposición a la incertidumbre de perseguir casi exclusivamente un ethos comercial global sin fricciones. Los eventos externos de proporciones significativas, como la reciente pandemia de COVID-19 y los correspondientes fenómenos de relocalización observados en México y América Central, aumentan la relevancia del tema.

Este estudio conceptual 1) arroja luz sobre la mayor incertidumbre sistémica debido a eventos extremos, 2) propone un protocolo de mitigación basado en opciones reales, y 3) prescribe incentivar las cadenas de valor regionales a través de asociaciones público-privadas.

Este estudio identifica una respuesta sistémica de las EMN destinada a mitigar las repercusiones de la sacudida más reciente de proporciones significativas en todo el mundo y sugiere desarrollar cadenas de valor regionales a través de asociaciones público-privadas. Al hacerlo, reconocemos una incipiente tendencia de las EMN hacia la nearshoring y la backshoring para lograr este fin. Este fenómeno está relativamente poco desarrollado en Europa, donde menos del 4% de las empresas se han dedicado a actividades de deslocalización, incluso en la región vasca de tres milenios de antigüedad. En contraste, el retroceso del año pasado de las cadenas globales de valor en México y América Central fue notable.

Nuestro estudio es uno de los primeros en explorar el fenómeno de la nearshoring como mecanismo de respuesta, y abre vías para encontrar mejores formas de mitigar las incertidumbres mundiales y la exposición a eventos extremos.

El concepto de opciones reales regionales ofrece una excelente oportunidad para que los profesionales y los gobiernos mejoren el éxito de las empresas multinacionales mediante la mitigación de las incertidumbres y, al mismo tiempo, la vida de miles de millones de personas.

O presente estudo oferece uma abordagem de cadeia de valor (opções reais) para reduzir a exposição à incerteza de buscar quase exclusivamente um ethos de negócios global sem atrito. Eventos externos de proporções significativas, como a recente pandemia de COVID-19 e os correspondentes fenômenos de realocação observados no México e na América Central, aumentam a relevância do tema.

Este estudo conceitual 1) lança luz sobre o aumento da incerteza sistêmica devido a eventos extremos, 2) propõe um protocolo de mitigação baseado em opções reais e 3) prescreve o incentivo às cadeias de valor regionais por meio de parcerias público-privadas.

Este estudo identifica uma resposta sistémica das empresas multinacionais com o objetivo de mitigar os impactos do choque mais recente de proporções significativas a nível mundial e sugere o desenvolvimento de cadeias de valor regionais através de parcerias público-privadas. Ao fazer isso, reconhecemos uma tendência emergente de multinacionais em direção ao nearshoring e backshoring para atingir esse fim. Este fenómeno está relativamente subdesenvolvido na Europa, onde menos de 4% das empresas se dedicaram a actividades de offshoring, mesmo na região basca de três milénios. Em contraste, a retração das cadeias globais de valor no México e na América Central no ano passado foi notável.

Nosso estudo é um dos primeiros a explorar o fenômeno do nearshoring como um mecanismo de resposta e abre caminhos para encontrar melhores maneiras de mitigar as incertezas globais e a exposição a eventos extremos.

O conceito de opções reais regionais oferece uma excelente oportunidade para profissionais e governos melhorarem o sucesso de empresas multinacionais, mitigando incertezas e, ao mesmo tempo, a vida de bilhões de pessoas.