Track: Doctoral Dissertation Competition

Abstract

Organizations suffer economic losses from operational disruptions (see Rice and Caniato, 2003, Chopra and Sodhi, 2004, Greising and Johnsson, 2007, Essuman et al., 2020, Haraguchi and Lall, 2015, Pettit et al., 2013). Thus, there is a pressing imperative to determine alternative modalities of enhancing the operational resilience of organizations that will allow firms to become “naturally” more tolerant to operational disruptions. In ecosystem research, functional diversity, functional redundancy, response diversity and adaptive capacity have been argued and proved to promote ecosystem stability, resilience and tolerance against natural and anthropogenic perturbations (see Nystrom and Folke, 2001; Folke et al, 2002; Mouillot et al, 2005; De Bello et al., 2007; Naeem, 1998; Galland et al, 2020; Walker, 1995; Desjardins et al, 2015; Elmqvist et al, 2003; Baskett et al, 2014; Leslie and McCabe, 2013; Mori et al, 2013, etc.). Owing to ecological thinking which supposes that organizational ecosystems function similarly as biological systems (Mars et al, 2012), it is hypothesized that firms can similarly leverage on functional trait diversity to enhance their potential operational resilience. To substantiate such postulation, this paper presents a biomimetic framework for qualifying and quantifying the functional trait diversity and adaptive capacity of organizations for the purpose of drawing insights that may prove useful in fortifying a firm’s posture against operational disruption.