A multilevel framework to enhance organizational resilience

Abstract

Organizational resilience is a capacity that emerges at multiple levels. Although the multilevel character of organizations has been generally acknowledged in existing organizational studies, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical studies that address how it affects organizational resilience. To adress this gap, this article offers a multilevel framework applicable to enhance organizational resilience and presents an empirical study to probe the impact of multilevel elements on organization's capacity for responding to critical situations. More specifically, the new framework will help an organization to enhance its resilience through a process of self-assessment on crisis preparedness and response capacity. This process will allow the organization to identify and remedy potential vulnerabilities in the interaction between its organs as well as environment. We argue that crisis management and organizational resilience are mutually shaped across multiple levels, from individual, organizational, to environmental. These multiple levels are operationalized operationalization in four phases: (1) reviewing and monitoring context, (2) testing preparedness, (3) analysing and assessing responses, and (4) strengthening capabilities. In these phases, we underline that resilience management requires continuous embracing of the dynamic processes within an organizational system and its environment. To validate the framework, we present an empirical study on a security organization, and describe the results to demonstrate how to utilise the tool in practice. In conclusion, we discuss how the multilevel framework can be further applied towards building stronger resilience management.     

Pseudo resilient supply chains: concept,traits, and practices

Supply chain vulnerability (SCV) and its counterpart supply risk management are increasingly researched in recent years. SCV is often quantifiable and can be effectively monitored if practices are implemented on a systematic basis. It is essentially more important to extend the research in supply chain risk management so as to address certain traits where the companies perform poor or areas where they overlook their performances. Here, we introduce the concept and property, the so-called pseudo resilience in supply chains where supply chains pretend to perform better in its risk management capabilities, but are essentially vulnerable. Pseudo resilience is an incessant nature of many supply chains to overlook concomitant risks. Typical traits of pseudo resilience were identified in this research and a brief analysis of the disruptions and its effects was done. This research is a maiden effort in the direction of addressing the property of pseudo resilience in supply chains. It is imperative for managers to identify the traits of pseudo resilience in their supply chains so as to avoid the ill effects resulting from it. Further quantitative and qualitative researches are recommended for evincing the property of pseudo resilience in supply chains.     

区域一体化、环境污染与社会福利

如何在区域协调发展中实现减排和社会福利的双增进已成为中国绿色高质量发展所面临的重大现实问题。本文在空间经济模型框架下探讨了区域一体化的环境和社会福利效应。基于1995-2016年中国30个省级行政区的数据,运用动态空间面板杜宾模型和广义空间二阶段最小二乘模型验证了区域一体化对环境污染和社会福利的影响。研究发现:(1)区域一体化对不同类型污染物的影响存在差异,区域一体化显著抑制了本地性污染物排放,但同时促进了全域性污染物的排放。(2)区域一体化与社会福利间呈现倒“U”形关系。在临界水平内,区域一体化有利于增进社会福利。(3)区域一体化对环境污染和社会福利的影响存在地区交互影响,即邻近地区的区域一体化促进了本地工业粉尘的排放,同时抑制了本地二氧化碳的排放,邻近地区的区域一体化有利于增进本地的社会福利。(4)区域一体化对环境污染和社会福利的影响存在显著的空间边界。本研究认为应对不同类型的污染物制定差异化环境政策,通过强化空间管理以充分利用区域一体化促进地区协同减排和增进社会福利的双重红利。     

区域一体化、环境污染与社会福利

如何在区域协调发展中实现减排和社会福利的双增进已成为中国绿色高质量发展所面临的重大现实问题。本文在空间经济模型框架下探讨了区域一体化的环境和社会福利效应。基于1995-2016年中国30个省级行政区的数据,运用动态空间面板杜宾模型和广义空间二阶段最小二乘模型验证了区域一体化对环境污染和社会福利的影响。研究发现:(1)区域一体化对不同类型污染物的影响存在差异,区域一体化显著抑制了本地性污染物排放,但同时促进了全域性污染物的排放。(2)区域一体化与社会福利间呈现倒“U”形关系。在临界水平内,区域一体化有利于增进社会福利。(3)区域一体化对环境污染和社会福利的影响存在地区交互影响,即邻近地区的区域一体化促进了本地工业粉尘的排放,同时抑制了本地二氧化碳的排放,邻近地区的区域一体化有利于增进本地的社会福利。(4)区域一体化对环境污染和社会福利的影响存在显著的空间边界。本研究认为应对不同类型的污染物制定差异化环境政策,通过强化空间管理以充分利用区域一体化促进地区协同减排和增进社会福利的双重红利。     

Organizational resilience as a key property of enterprise risk management in response to novel and severe crisis events

The COVID-19 pandemic represented a novel risk event. Research on similar past crises identified risk culture and leadership as properties of effective enterprise risk management to enable companies to respond “like a rubber ball” to such events. The focus of this paper is on the question of how enterprise risk management (ERM) can develop such resilience. A comprehensive literature review was undertaken to enrich the ERM framework with insights from organizational resilience theory, resource and dynamic capability theory and system psychodynamic thinking, addressing the human dynamics at play when coping with such a crisis. It was complemented by a global empirical study among C-level executives in insurance on the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some key insights were identified: a learning culture, a strong system permeability, a clear purpose, strong leadership to ensure alignment and autonomy of teams and a culture of trust, where employees feel safe, but also dare to take courageous steps to benefit from the crisis. While the newly developed organizational resilience framework identifies the key themes, the organizational resilience map provides guidance on how to develop organizational resilience. This paper enables researchers and practitioners to identify key themes to render a company more resilient to unforeseen risk events.     

旱灾风险的特征及其防范研究——由西南旱灾和冬麦区大旱引发的思考

旱灾不是所有自然灾害中发生频率最高、等级最重,却是受灾人数最多、影响范围最广的一种自然灾害.旱灾的缓发性、后延性、复杂性特征,容易引发饥荒、贫困、政治冲突甚至社会动荡等风险,故旱灾的风险管理日益成为一个国家自然灾害管理或社会管理的重要内容.传统的"危机管理"模式对旱灾等自然灾害管理的作用有限,"综合风险防范"模式具有很...     

The determinants of integrating policy-based and community-based adaptation into coastal hazard risk management: a resilience approach

Abstract

A growing number of studies focus on improving the understanding of how the households’ adaptations can be encouraged in the process of coastal hazards and risk management. Particularly, this process is undergoing a major paradigm shift as it moves from an approach dominated by policy-based adaptation to another one in which community-based resilience building is favored. Thus, this article aims to apply a resilience approach to improve the knowledge about how public measures influence private autonomous adaptation behavior, through a transdisciplinary investigation of household adaptation behavior and its determinants. The Resilience Framework of Household Autonomous Adaptation to Climate- and Weather-Related Hazard Risks (ROHACHR) is proposed and combined with a focus group meeting and multivariate analysis to compare pre-disaster, during a disaster, post-disaster adaptations, and resilience behavior of households. Using an empirical survey of the households in three coastal municipalities in Taiwan, we examine the relationships between public measures and private adaptations that provides three distinguishing types of household behavior: ‘core’, ‘trust in governmental aid’, and ‘awareness and structures’. Results show that providing hazard risk information may be one step toward encouraging private autonomous adaptations. Several factors that help foster resilience also appear to be influential in households’ adaptation decisions, such as specific and positive governmental aid, information trust, and social capital. Based on these results, it shows that the ROHACHR is useful to characterize households’ adaptation and resilience behavior and explain how they respond to public measures. Finally, the policy implications of our findings for improving resilience of coastal communities and encouraging public-private collaboration in the process of hazard risk management are discussed.     

Toward adaptive decision support for assessing infrastructure system resilience using hidden performance measures

The understanding of resilience is an emerging topic within the study of risks affecting distributed infrastructure systems. Although recent studies have explored the quantification of system resilience, there has been limited research aimed at understanding the role of multiple performance measures, spatiotemporal heterogeneities, and modeling uncertainties within the assessment of resilience and associated decision-making. Under real-world conditions, there is an increased burden on analysts for translating observed system data (including human and electronic sensor observations) into system performance estimates that may not be directly observable. This paper addresses these issues using a scenario-based risk modeling approach to understand: (1) resilience of complex systems, often in cases of hidden (not readily observable) measures of performance, (2) resilience sensitivity to modeling uncertainties in event and system characteristics, and (3) resilience sensitivity to the measurement of performance across multiple operational perspectives. The methods in this paper integrate uncertainty-driven risk and probabilistic modeling within a multi-state Markov-based approach. This study contributes to the state-of-the-art by developing methodologies for assessing community perceptions of infrastructure system resilience using observable factors and inferring possibly hidden performance measures for facilitating adaptive decision-support. The methods are demonstrated with hypothetical spatiotemporal data across multiple system performance dimensions. The analysis results are useful for infrastructure security analysts, system decision-makers, and the general public.     

A practical road map for assessing cyber risk

The increase in interconnectivity and developments in technology have caused cyber security to become a universal concern. This paper highlights the dangers of the evolution of cyber risk, the challenges of quantifying the impact of cyber-attacks and the feasibility of the traditional actuarial methodologies for quantifying cyber losses. In this paper, we present a practical roadmap for assessing cyber risk, a roadmap that emphasizes the importance of developing a company and culture-specific risk and resilience model. We develop a structure for a Bayesian network to model the financial loss as a function of the key drivers of risk and resilience. We use qualitative scorecard assessment to determine the level of cyber risk exposure and evaluate the effectiveness of resilience efforts in the organization. We highlight the importance of capitalizing on the knowledge of experts within the organization and discuss methods for aggregating multiple assessments. From an enterprise risk management perspective, impact on value should be the primary concern of managers. This paper uses a value-centric/reputational approach to risk management rather than a regulatory/capital-centric approach to risk.     

Cyber risk management: History and future research directions

Cybersecurity research started in the late 1960s and has continuously evolved under different names such as computer security and information security. This article briefly covers that history but will especially focus on the latest incarnation known as “cyber risk management,” which includes both technical and economic/management dimensions. The main focus of the article is to review research on individual steps of the cyber risk management process and on the overall process to highlight gaps and determine research directions. Two main findings are that cyber risk is difficult to include in the overall enterprise risk management process and that a move toward cyber resilience is necessary to deal with such a complex risk. Both findings require a level of interdisciplinary collaboration that is currently lacking.     

WATER TODAY AND TOMORROW: Prospects for overcoming scarcity

This paper provides a general overview of the fresh water scarcity that parts of the world are facing today and will increasingly face in the coming decades. It demonstrates why and how many countries, especially developing and newly industrialized regions in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America will be vulnerable to lack of water. It shows how this will affect health, mortality and the prospects for peace if nothing is done to correct the imbalance between supply and demand. It is argued that scarcity is largely the result of poor water management and that with the implementation of proven methods of raising the efficiency of water withdrawal, use and consumption on the one hand, and of more efficient and integrated water supply on the other, the problem could be solved.     

A model of cost-based transfer pricing

In most decentralized organizations, goods and services are transferred between divisions. These transfers are frequently recorded in the accounting books of the divisions; the term transfer price refers to the dollar amount of the interdivisional exchange. This study considers two main issues: (i) the costs and the benefits of delegating decisions through a system of transfer pricing and divisional performance evaluation, and (ii) the performance of one common method of pricing intrafirm transactions: cost-based transfer pricing.The study analyzes a firm in which each divisional manager has better information about the divisional environment than what is known by the firm's top management. The first half of the paper demonstrates that the firm can attain the optimal level of profits with a compensation system utilizing (i) reports by divisional managers describing in complete detail each manager's private information, and (ii) divisional performance evaluation with cost-based transfer pricing. Next, a situation is considered in which divisional managers are not able to communicate their private information to the firm's top management because of complexity of divisional environments or managers' specialized expertise. In this bounded-rationality setting, a managerial-compensation system employing cost-based transfer pricing allows the firm to earn strictly higher expected profits than if all decisions are made by the firm's top management relying on divisional managers' reports.Financial support from the Unisys Corporation is gratefully acknowledged.     

Drought risk in Nicaragua: a crop,region and technology-specific empirical evaluation

Nicaraguan agriculture is largely rainfed. Drought risk is endemic, consistently wiping out large proportions of potential crop production. An insurance programme that would shift drought risk from farmers could therefore have significant welfare effects. A first step towards analysing drought insurance is the establishment of the empirical connection between rainfall levels and the risk of low returns to crop production. Having reviewed the nature of the agricultural insurance problem and the promise held out by drought insurance, we carry out a preliminary empirical analysis of drought risk. This is done by combining agronomic, economic and meteorological data to predict the probability that economic returns to a particular crop-region-technology combination will fall below a minimum. Four insights emerge: (1) Of the crops analysed, maize, sesame, soybeans and sorghum are the most affected by drought risk; (2) drought risk levels vary considerably across regions; (3) risk levels are also considerably affected by the choice of technology, the shifting of risks via insurance may remove a significant impediment to agricultural modernization; and (4) for some crops in some regions, the risk levels may be too high to allow successful operation of private drought insurance markets. Hence government subsidies may be in order.     

Did public risk perspectives of mad cow disease reflect media representations and actual outcomes?

The first confirmed Canadian case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) was reported to the general public on 20 May 2003 and received considerable media coverage. A random‐digit dialled telephone survey of 1207 people in Alberta, Canada, was conducted in spring 2007 to better understand public perspectives on the resulting economic concerns and effects on farming. Comparisons to other risk events and concerns about the overall risk were also examined. Respondents acknowledged BSE to be an economic risk, especially to cattle producers. Health risks were of little concern, especially in comparison to other relevant risk events such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the BSE crisis in Britain. However, the risk of BSE was perceived as more dangerous should a domestically attributed case of variant Creutzfeldt‐Jakob disease (vCJD) (the human form of the disease) occur. The social amplification of risk framework (SARF) was extended to demonstrate that the discovery of BSE in Alberta led to neither an amplification nor attenuation of risk. Rather, risk management strategies employed in Alberta led to a mirroring of media representations and public perceptions of the risk. This unusual situation is in part due to the social and cultural context of the discovery of BSE in Alberta, including the history and pride of beef production in Alberta, how the risk was anchored, and a trust in government fostered by the media. This research also demonstrated how the application and interpretation of SARF is dependent on the comparative value used to assess whether amplification or attenuation has occurred.     

商业银行经济资本管理理论和实践探索

经济资本管理基于资本的稀缺性和高成本性,具有效益约束和风险约束的双效应。近年来,银行管理领域发生的最为显著的变化是,其管理重点逐渐过渡到以风险度量和资本优化配置为核心的全面风险管理。经济资本是贯穿风险度量和资本优化配置这一过程的关键概念,不仅可以提高商业银行的资本管理水平,而且通过发挥经济资本在商业银行经营管理中的预算管理、资源配置和绩效考核作用,推动我国商业银行向现代商业银行转变。从长远看,推行经济资本管理将对商业银行和金融监管当局产生重大的深远影响。     

Resilience indicators: opportunities for including distributive justice concerns in disaster management

This paper presents a systematic review of the concept of resilience in the field of disaster management, with a focus on the use of indicators and the inclusion of social justice considerations. The literature is reviewed with reference to various definitions of resilience, the relation between concepts of resilience and vulnerability, the conceptualization of resilience and the use of indicators, and the inclusion of social justice issues. The analysis shows that different disciplines employ various definitions of resilience and conceptions of its relation to vulnerability. Although recognized as important, distributive issues are not currently addressed in the literature. As a result, we lack a clear sense of what equality or distributive justice should mean in the context of resilience and disaster management. An approach based on capabilities is proposed as a promising way forward.     

‘Pushing the Boundaries’ versus Identifying the Boundaries: An Institutional Perspective on NPM Principles

This paper considers the boundaries of new public management (NPM) principles in the context of the mandate for a commercial approach within a New Zealand state‐owned enterprise (SOE). Investigating a commercial approach to NPM through an institutional theory lens, the case study highlights complexities and potential conflict between structured NPM principles and the more complex reality. Analysis reveals blurred lines and boundaries have implications for public sector organisations such as SOEs, government and other stakeholders, where managers push the boundaries beyond the point where stakeholders are comfortable. Thus, a key challenge involves developing clearer institutional boundaries to balance freedoms with stakeholder acceptability.     

供应链风险源分析

本文从风险源可控与否的角度对供应链风险因素进行了重新分类,将自然灾害、全球化、产品区域垄断性加强、通信和信息技术的瓶颈问题、各国各地政策和法律差异、政治和经济的干预、消费者偏好的复杂多变等归纳为企业不可控的风险因素;将外包、短暂生命周期、供应商管理库存、企业经营和管理中的技术依赖以及依赖少数几个供应商归纳为企业可控风险因素,并对各风险因素进行了详细分析。     

The mismanagement of evil

This article stretches the boundaries of Futures' coverage. It may be taken as a satire on either world order thinking or on the responses of those who oppose such Utopian visions, or both. The ‘scientific management of evil’ considered here may be the best definition of 20th century totalitarian systems yet devised—although some may consider it inapposite to worry about what evil may be possible in a steady-state peaceful world which still seems so distant at present.