Heeding Small-scale Disruptions: The Benefits of Network Fragmentation

Organizations operate in increasingly turbulent environments requiring them to stay resilient in the face of setbacks, i.e., to maintain desired levels of performance when faced with disruptions. Small-scale disruptions happen frequently in most organizations, and therefore they often co-occur or overlap in time. This creates a significant cognitive burden for the employees because they often need to resolve multiple disruptions at the same time. Despite the fact that small-scale disruptions are so common, most resilience literature to date has not recognized the implications of small-scale disruptions when they co-occur, and has not offered any organizational response strategies for dealing with this challenge. To account for this, we rely on the task-switching literature and suggest that dealing with co-occurring disruptions resembles a task-switching problem for the employees. We propose that increased disruption co-occurrence increases time to recovery from the disruptions, i.e., negatively impacts organizational resilience. Further, we propose that assuring that different groups of employees can work on different disruptions, i.e., increasing the fragmentation of the information-sharing network, dampens the positive relationship between disruption co-occurrence and time to recovery. These hypotheses were supported on a sample of 2,009 situations of co-occurring disruptions in a public water supply company. This study advances knowledge on the effects of the small-scale disruptions on organizational resilience, and suggests that network fragmentation can be a successful organizational strategy to sustain resilience under increased disruption co-occurrence.