"Every normal organization would have stepped away": Organizational resilience in self-managing organizations

Self-managing organizations (SMOs) share particular characteristics, such as flexible hierarchies and empowered members, which suggest increased organizational resilience in turbulent environments. Yet, in absence of an authoritative body deploying resources and people, organizational resilience of SMOs grounds fundamentally in the individual choices and actions of their members. This paper thus assumes a rare position in research on organizational resilience, exploring individual behaviour and cognition as fundament of resilience. Based on a case study of a radical SMO in crisis, the paper identifies five micro-foundations of organizational resilience and discusses them against organizational characteristics. I synthesise the identified interactions into a model of the micro-foundations of organizational resilience. The model provides new theoretical propositions on how organizational characteristics create enhanced situational awareness and self-motivated action in the SMO’s members as basis for organizational resilience.