Strategic Resilience as an Organizational Capability: Toward a Middle-Range Theory of Sustained Competitive Adaptation
Keywords:
strategic resilience capability, dynamic capabilities, organizational resilience, adaptive learning, resource reconfiguration, sustained competitive adaptationAbstract
Organizations increasingly operate in environments characterized by persistent turbulence driven by technological disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, climate-related risks, and institutional volatility, making sustained competitive adaptation a strategic imperative. Although Dynamic Capabilities Theory explains how firms renew and reconfigure resources, while Organizational Resilience Theory explains how organizations respond to adversity, existing research provides limited understanding of how resilience evolves into an enduring organizational capability that continuously enables adaptation. This conceptual paper addresses this theoretical gap by developing Strategic Resilience Capability Theory (SRCT) as a middle-range theory integrating dynamic capabilities, adaptive learning, strategic resource reconfiguration, and organizational resilience into a coherent explanatory framework. Using a theory-building approach, the paper specifies the theory's domain, defines its core constructs, develops the underlying capability-building mechanism, identifies boundary conditions, and formulates theoretically grounded propositions. The proposed framework reconceptualizes resilience as a higher-order organizational capability emerging through cumulative adaptive learning and institutionalized resource reconfiguration, thereby enabling sustained competitive adaptation under persistent environmental turbulence. This theory extends strategic management scholarship by offering a coherent conceptual foundation for future empirical research across diverse organizational and institutional contexts.
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