SARATHI: Factors Fostering Organizational Resilience in Small-Cap IT Companies in India.
| Author | Birthare, Neelam |
Introduction
The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, Afghan crisis, climate issues, hybrid workplaces and data-driven competence has made it clear that we live in a vulnerable and fluid world which demands resilience. Resilience is the ability to adapt positively in challenging circumstances. Resilience is emerging as a paradigm due to its significance for individuals, families, organizations and communities' at large (Adekola & Clelland, 2020; Fletcher & Sarkar, 2013). The upsurge in the studies on organizational resilience in management literature since past two decades points to its strategic relevance for attaining business success. It is seen as a solution for organizations that deal with unprecedented scenarios and struggle to survive in their continuously evolving business environment (Ovans, 2015).
While there are studies that reveal how large organizations with well-defined processes, structures, and affluence of resources remain on top, there is a dearth of studies on organizational resilience focused on small-cap organizations (Bhamra, Dani & Burnard, 2011; Denyer, 2017). The extant literature reveals, resilience is not limited to times of crisis; individuals, teams, and organizations exhibit resilience while coping with everyday challenges such as stress and shifting job and market demands (Alliger, Cerasoli, Tannenbaum & Vessey, 2015) . Organizational resilience is embodied in our ordinary lives in our routines, habits, norms, practices, and processes (Masten, 2001; Lengnick-Hall, Beck & Lengnick-Hall, 2011).
Scholars acknowledge that resilience research is too focused on the extreme continuum of adversities; studies examining resilience when business is usual in everyday context are rare (Branicki, Steyer & Sullivan-Taylor, 2019). Here, business as usual implies the situation when no major event is threatening organizational survival but incremental changes, need for continuous reconstruction, chronic workplace issues such as stress, conflict; burnouts are common and demand resilience. We therefore ask how organizational resilience is manifested in smaller enterprises that successfully manage to cope with the everyday challenges offered by their dynamic work environment. This study aims to identify the factors that facilitate these organizations to survive and thrive in IT industry by capturing the insider perspective of IT employees.
Tale of Mercurial Conceptualization
Organizational resilience is defined as an ability, capability, process, latent construct, and positive development trajectory of an organization facing challenges (Carnahan, Agarwal & Campbell, 2010; Duchek, 2020; Hillmann, 2020). While some scholars proposed a broad, umbrella perspective on organizational resilience others advocated a narrowed stringent view (Hirsch & Levin, 1999). For example, Denyer (2017:5) states organizational resilience as "an ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, respond, and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper (2017), while Munoz et al. (2022) adopted a rebound-oriented perspective on organizational resilience and conceptualized it as the ability to recover or bounce back.
An examination of extant literature pinpoints at the areas of consensus about organizational resilience research. Positive adaptation and adversity are accepted as fundamentals of resilience at all the levels of analysis (Fletcher & Sarkar, 2013). Organizational resilience is context sensitive (Ingram & G3od, 2018; Kimberlin, Schwartz & Austin, 2011). Depending on the context in which resilience is examined, the intensity and duration of adversity, and the nature and indicators of positive adaptation, numerous factors that contribute to organizational resilience are identified. Table 1 enlists these factors identified from the literature; they are sorted based on a heuristic framework that classifies these factors as organizational assets, context, and processes conducive to resilience(Fisher, Ragsdale & Fisher, 2019; Hartmann, Weiss, Newman & Hoegl, 2020).
Theoretical Underpinning
This study is rooted in the presumptions of psychology that organizational resilience is embedded in the collective capacity of its people which can be developed by creating competencies in core employees (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011). This assumption is aligned with Schneider (1987) who postulates that "environments are a function of persons behaving in them (1987:438)." People make the organization, in organizations; an attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) cycle is in action. This implies that people are not vaguely a part of an organization, instead, they create organizational sub-systems that influence the organization by its collective thoughts, actions, and emotions.
A second relevant theory to our discussion relates to conservation of resources. Hobfoll (1989) proposed that people have a tendency to preserve, protect, and build resources. Emphasizing on resources as the only entity capable of explaining the phenomenon of stress, Hobfoll defined resources as any object, personal characteristics, energy, or condition that an individual values or using which one can attain these objects, personal characteristics, energy, or condition. These resources have instrumental and symbolic values. While in normal situations an individual focuses on developing or attaining more resources, in times of crisis, they attempt to avoid resource loss by conserving their limited resources or use them as a transactional means to attain other resources to deal with the challenges. These resources are of different types--personal, social, situational, and structural.
Organizational Context
The information technology (IT) industry deals with the challenges of technological innovation, shifting supply demand factors, cyber threats, security risks, competition from tech giants to gig workers, and the evergreen issue of attrition, work pressure, and burn out (Hetland, Sandal & Johnsen, 2007). Despite these challenges IT is the fastest growing sector in India, it remained as one of the least impacted sectors in the COVID-19 recession (Subramanian, 2006). The big tech companies remain resilient with their commitment to investments in product research and risk analysis, innovation, resourcefulness, robust infrastructure and process driven practices (Hamel & Valikangas, 2004; Pal et al., 2014). Despite resource constraints and chronic uncertainties that occur due to the fast changing technical environment, several small-cap IT companies survive in a demanding IT sector and pave ahead in the global market.
Method
The purpose of the study is to identify factors that aid IT employees in dealing with everyday organizational challenges and contribute to organizational resilience. For this purpose, we interviewed 33 employees from three IT companies from Indore city in India with small organizational size employing 70-140 employees. The participants for the interviews were selected from different levels of hierarchy to assure representation of different segments. The assumption that the perception about organizational resilience in a resilient organization should be same at different levels of hierarchy guided our participant selection process.(Witmer & Mellinger, 2016). The study was approved by the B-School Ethics Committee and the sample consisted of employees holding key designations such as CEO, MD, HR Manager, Marketing Head, Technical Architect, Project Manager, and Lead Analyst. Using snowba --11 sampling, the top executives were requested to pinpoint key team-players who successfully deal with their daily hassles such as client demands, work pressure, and team conflicts. The sample consisted of 26 men and 7 women between the ages of 24 years and 55 years with their total experience ranging from 1 to 17 years in the IT industry. All the participants were Indians; eight of them had onsite experience in western countries.
We adopted an emic approach to capture insiders' perspectives. The interviews were audio-taped using a Dictaphone after seeking interviewees' approval. The study is based on semi-structured interviews, field notes, organizational archival records, and direct observations as sources of evidence (Zhu & Bargiela-Chiappini, 2013). Each interview lasted for thirty-five minutes to an hour; the data was collected within the time frame of five months. The existing literature was used to design interview guidelines that included preliminary questions divided in to three sections. The first...
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