Understanding Resilience and Sustainability in Organizations: A Cutting-Edge Framework and the Research Agenda

Given the conceptual confusion between resilience and sustainability in organizations in the literature, the present study examined the literature on the relationship between the two by reviewing the past 27 years of global literature on resilience and sustainability in organizations, to clarify the relationship between the two. It adapted the Integrated Systematic Literature Review technique (ISLR) to identify the most influential scholars in the knowledge domain of resilience and sustainability in organizations, uncover the intellectual structure that defines the knowledge base on resilience and sustainability in organizations, identify the most influential documents in the knowledge domain, derive the most interesting topics in the knowledge domain, and derive the cutting-edge body of knowledge on resilience and sustainability in organizations in response to the dynamic nature of resilience and sustainability problems. The findings reveal that Ivanov, Bansal, and Sarkis are the most influential scholars in the knowledge domain, and the most influential document was authored by Ortiz-de-Mandojana and Bansal. This study uncovers five schools of thought: sustainable business strategy, predictive analytics, sustainable supply chain, ecological resilience, and sustainable leadership. Informed by the analyses, a cutting-edge framework, comprising sustainability practices, sustainability outputs, and sustainability and resilience outcomes, was derived to guide future research and inform practitioners on how to ensure resilience and sustainability in their organizations.