Professional Development: Learning in the Workplace

BOOK AND MEDIA REVIEWS

Organizational Resilience. How Learning Sustains Organizations
in Crisis, Disaster, and Breakdown by D. Christopher Kayes
New York, Oxford University Press, 2015
192 pp.
ISBN 978-0-19-979105-7
eISBN 978-0-19-024584-9
Review DOI 10.1108/TLO-07-2017-0074

Organizational resilience: a brief introduction
Since the early years of this century, resilience has become an emerging topic in the business and
management literature, well-known and applied in other sciences as psychology, ecology and
engineering. Creating an organizational capacity for resilience requires, first, resilient individuals.

While personal resilience refers to the psychological ability to bounce back from negative
emotional experiences and the flexible adaptation to environmental changing demands, the
organizational resilience – following Lengnick-Hall et al. (2011) – could be defined as a firm’s
ability to efficiently absorb, develop specific responses and ultimately engage in transformative
activities to capitalize on disruptive surprises that potentially threaten organization survival.
Thus, the organizational resilience concept includes resistance, adaptation and adaptability as
main properties and implies shock absorption, reorganization and learning and adapting as main
capacities.

Applied at the system level, resilience has three main approaches: the engineering
(focused on the equilibrium notion), the ecological (linked to robustness, efficiency and
return to equilibrium characteristics) and the adaptive (finding a balance between efficiency
and adaptability to change). Although the adaptive approach may seem to fit the concepts of
learning organization and organizational learning, recent literature on company resilience
has emphasized the hypothesis that continuous innovation influences long-run
sustainability and resilience and greater than having merely an adaptive capacity.
Therefore, organizational resilience-focus management could be understood as a strategy of
continuous anticipation and adjustment to disturbances by balancing efficiency and
adaptability and, accordingly, an organization’s ability to continuously create competitive
advantages based on innovations.

In Menéndez and Montes (2016), several factors contributing to developing nurtured
company resilience have been explored in a conceptual and practical approach. A recent
empirical research based on this theoretical framework has noted the extraordinary
contribution of human capital (defined in a broad sense) to company resilience: Human
capital develops adaptation and adaptability through training, skills development, research
and development (R&D) and changing company human resource structure by recruiting
more qualified R&D personnel, engineers and graduates.

An overview of Kayes’ book: the main hypothesis and research strategy
By mixing the topic of organizational resilience (in a section of three) with the classic of
organizational learning (in two sections), Professor Kayes argues and develops his

Book and
media reviews

143

The Learning Organization
Vol. 25 No. 2, 2018

pp. 143-146
© Emerald Publishing Limited

0969-6474

main hypothesis on organizational resilience: A failure in organizations comes from a
breakdown in learning, although fortunately the process of breakdown is itself a way of
learning, latter being the key source of resilience in the aftermath of events. Hence,
learning – especially from experience – is the valuable intervention to maintain
resilience in the face of crisis, disaster and breakdown. Learning helps individuals
understand the breakdown and how to develop an effective response in the future. In
fact, the book is focused, mainly, on the processes and mechanism whereby learning
breaks down.

Throughout the book, Professor Kayes shows how learning can help organizations
become more resilient. One of two main research strategies to discuss the main
hypothesis assumed is to explore how learning theory, research and practice influence
the study of organizational resilience by rethinking Dewey’s vision of learning from
experience (the experiential learning theory). Professor Kayes considers organizations
as systems of interrelated learnings, in which routines and novelties interact to form
learning and performance-based outcomes. At this point, Professor Kayes – as expected
– is critical of certain popular management practices such as goal setting and rational
thinking because they limit learning and can threaten resilience.The second main
research strategy is related to the multiple study cases exposed for discussing his main
thesis.

As expected, learning is the central source of resilience and the primary force for
survival: learning, especially learning from experience, explains how organizations
sustain resilience in the face of disaster, crisis and breakdown. When learning from
experience breaks down, organizations become vulnerable; as a result, the breakdown
of learning contributes to and is responsible for many organizational failures.

The structure and organization of the book
The structure of the book is as follows: In Section 1, Professor Kayes discusses the role
that experience plays in learning in organizations by considering insights from the
theory of experience and learning in organizations, especially from evidence-based
learning, learning direct experience, counter experience and exploration. The
theoretical references are grounded on Dewey and Kolb developments, mainly in the
premise that the three aspects of experience (habits, emotions and cognitions) are the
sources for learning in organizations.

In Section 2, Professor Kayes applies concepts of learning from experience to
organizational processes, explores different characterizations of failure in
organizations and discusses a new conceptualization of organizational breakdown
based on how organizations learn or fail to learn from experience: in fact, failure could
be considered, oftentimes, an inability of an organization to respond appropriately to
external circumstances. Professor Kayes supports, greatly, in the contents of this
section the claim that organizational failure comes from a breakdown of learning. He
also illustrates this statement by examining recent collapses examples of the
breakdown of learning: The 2008 financial crisis, in general, and the bankruptcy of
Enron and Lehman Brothers, in particular, are examples of the breakdown of
learning. Specifically, the case of Enron is related to the discussion on performance vs
learning oriented systems in the sense that some pays for performance and other
reward systems contribute to the breakdown of learning in organizations.

Finally, Professor Kayes devotes Section 3 to analyze the case study called the greatest
intelligence failure in a generation: the misinterpretation of intelligence of weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq in 2002 and 2003 and how certain players in the oil and gas industry have

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recovered from catastrophic failure to build organizations that rely on continuous learning.
Amongst the different types of learning considered as interventions (cross-training across
different functions, perceptual contrast training, coordination training self-correction
training, scenario-based training and guided error training), the experiential one is broadly
discussed because the ability to learn from experience is a key factor in organizational
resilience.

The theoretical framework of Kayes insights combines management learning with
organizational disaster research in a four stage model of learning breakdown built from
Turner’s model of organizational and inter-organizational disaster. According this
framework, organizational resilience is a function of an organization’s abilities to manage
shifts in learning across the four stages of breakdown. Therefore, the meaning of
organizational resilience is related to the role of learning from prior breakdowns and the
introduction of learning into the daily company routines. In this context, based on the
analysis of two industries – commercial aviation in the USA and the oil and gas industry –
Professor Kayes shows how learning drives to resilience (Chapter 11: Building Learning in
Organizations).

Positive discussion and implications
Although the main thesis of the book is well discussed, theoretically grounded and
articulated with the help of several study cases, greater attention and detail about the
concept of resilience is necessary. For readers unfamiliar with this topic, a brief definition,
description and scope of the three most important approaches existing and a precise
framework under which the topic is studied would be desirable. However, the crucial
question is if learning is the pivotal source of organizational resilience. To a large extent, I
agree, but in my opinion is the company human capital or human capability – and learning
is a variable included in it – the main source of organizational resilience – as exposed in the
introduction section – although more empirical research is needed in this regard.
Entrepreneurial leadership is also necessary to mobilize the organization’s resources,
capabilities and employees.

Methodologically, an alternative way to take advantage of Kayes’ insights could be by
developing propositions and discuss them considering the study cases. Both for scholars
and practitioners, the lessons learned from the multiple study cases discussed are valuable
as well as the analysis and conclusions about the links between organizational resilience and
the performance vs learning systems. Is it possible to develop organizational resilience only
with learning?

Juan Manuel Menéndez Blanco
Department of Applied Economics I, Faculty of and Social Sciences,

King Juan Carlos University, Madrid, Spain

References
Lengnick-Hall, C.A., Beck, T.E. and Lengnick-Hall, M.L. (2011), “Developing a capacity for

organizational resilience through strategic human resource management”, Human Resource
Management Review, Vol. 21 No. 3, pp. 243-255.

Menéndez, J.M. and Montes, J.L. (2016), “What contributes to adaptive company resilience? A
conceptual and practical approach”, Development and Learning in Organizations: An
International Journal, Vol. 30 No. 4, pp. 17-20.

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media reviews

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Further reading
Kayes, D.C. and Yoon, J. (2016), “The breakdown and rebuilding of learning during organizational

crisis, disaster, and failure”, Organizational Dynamics, Vol. 45 No. 2, pp. 71-79.
Linnenluecke, M.K. (2017), “Resilience in business and management research: a review of influential

publications and a research agenda”, International Journal of Managements Reviews, Vol. 19
No. 1, pp. 4-30.

Örtenblad, A. (Ed.) (2013), Handbook of Research on the Learning Organization: Adaptation and
Context, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, and Northampton, MA.

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Outline placeholder
Organizational resilience: a brief introduction
An overview of Kayes’ book: the main hypothesis and research strategy
The structure and organization of the book
Positive discussion and implications
References

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