Reframing Resilience on Novelty and Change

In this chapter, I define resilience in relation to the novelty profiles of adversity triggers. This allows for us to separate resilience into three different outcomes: absorptive, adaptive, and transformative. This definition of resilience builds on the literature, arguing that although resilience emphasizes the ability to persist, it also implies change in several ways, hence clarifying how these two apparently conflicting elements can be reconciled. Moreover, it responds to the call for a theoretical elaboration of resilience that has been raised recently in the literature; this call has aimed to push several advancements, including the state-of-the-art of the conceptualization of resilience and its pursuit in organizations. One of the key issues that keeps theories of resilience in a stalemate concerns the translation of the question on what resilience is into the specification of the adversities that are challenging it. Critics have acknowledged that this flow of thought leads to the paradoxical situation of increasing vulnerability rather than producing resilience. By building resilience on novelty, I address this critique by conceiving adversities in terms of their unexpectedness and of the knowledge that needs to be developed to face them. Hence, along profiles of increasing novelty, adversities range from known situations to unknown situations, and resilience results in: i) absorption of adversities with no final change (absorptive resilience), ii) adaptation with some level of change (adaptive resilience), and iii) transformation showing an important change that can even take the form of a radical shift in organizational identity (transformative resilience).