Sources of Organizational Resilience: Sustaining Production and Safety in a Transportation Firm.

摘要

This study applies principles of the emerging field of Resilience Engineering to examine the relationship between how well organizations can adapt to disruption and how effective that organization is at proactive safety management. Prior research has shown that an organization can be highly adaptive to relatively frequent disrupting events in order to meet production pressure and economic goals, while at the same time that organization can have a weak safety record.;However, transportation firms must meet the ultra-high safety expectations of government regulators, customers, and the public in general. At the same time, in order to operate successfully as businesses, these organizations must be highly adaptive to schedule disrupting factors such as customer desires, weather, seasonal trends, infrastructure concerns, and special events.;The study was conducted between August 2012 and November 2014 in partnership with a major transportation company. The firm served as an excellent natural laboratory for this research because, in addition to being inherently adaptive in normal operations, it has been a high achiever in proactive safety management.;The organization's normal mechanisms for handling schedule changes were studied through ethnographic observations and interviews and provided a baseline for comparison. The main focus of the study was on how the organization responded to specific challenge events, which were observed directly and further explored through follow-up interviews. Challenges included extreme weather events such as Hurricane Sandy and predictable periods of high transportation demand such as the Thanksgiving holiday. Other events, such as the Super Bowl, were challenging because operations were tightly focused in time and space. In all cases, poor handling of the consequences of a disruption could have a significant impact on the firm's customers and its business base; a major safety incident could affect the long-term viability of the organization. While normal operations had built in mechanisms to support smooth adaptation to the regularly occurring scale of disruptions, the company reconfigured these mechanisms to be prepared to keep up with the pace imposed by the challenge events. Relationships across levels, information flows, and decision authority all changed in order to make timely and effective decisions even though the challenges produced surprises that could not be predicted in detail. These reconfigurations included pushing initiative down to points of action and re-prioritizing responsiveness over cost. Such changes allowed for rapid decisions and actions to reduce the potential for events to cascade during large challenge situations or to mitigate or stop event cascades in progress.;The study also captured longer-term trends in the firm. Increased demand coupled with severe weather in the latter part of the study period tested the firm's adaptability. It was able to increase organic resources to meet demand, but that process illustrated the interaction of financial challenges with performance pressures that required high adaptability.;The study adds to the body of empirical studies of resilience in action for the growing field of Resilience Engineering. The study highlighted patterns about organizations that are able to demonstrate resilient performance in the face of potentially surprising challenges.