Editorial: Managing recovery and resilience in organizations: the impact of employee competence and development on firm recovery – a multidimensional conceptualization

In recent years, crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical instability and climate-related disasters have severely tested organizations' ability to survive and adapt. These shocks have exposed deep vulnerabilities in strategic planning and underscored the critical need for organizational resilience. While resilience has been widely discussed in management literature and research (Hillmann and Guenther, 2021; Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011) at different levels of analysis – individual, organizational and regional – what still deserves attention is the role of employee competence development as a foundational driver of organizational recovery and longer-term viability. Existing approaches often emphasize macro-level governance, regulatory frameworks and capital access (Awan et al., 2018; Pope and Petrova, 2017), yet they tend to neglect the critical micro-foundations of resilience – namely, the people who constitute organizations (Felin et al., 2012).This special issue (SI) responds to that gap by shifting focus to the processes through which organizations can recruit, develop and retain competent employees to foster resilience across organizational levels (Raetze et al., 2021). Employee competence is more than a static asset; it is a dynamic human capability cultivated through deliberate human resource (HR) practices such as coaching and learning (Akdere and Egan, 2020; Bond and Seneque, 2012) and personal development autonomy (Felin et al., 2012; Teece, 2012). However, the pandemic has shown that these practices must be adaptive and scalable in the face of disruptions and embedded into both leadership and frontline decision-making structures and operational frameworks (Mendy, 2020).As part of the recent developments, digital transformation and evolving social networks now offer new avenues for competency building (Akgün et al., 2023; Lang et al., 2022). These tools enhance not just individual learning (the people-related aspects of resilience – Rahman and Mendy, 2019) but also collective adaptability, helping organizations to absorb and learn from crises. However, questions remain about how these emerging tools interact with traditional management development to enhance resilience and recovery-building capability, especially in high-pressure work and crises-ridden contexts.The papers featured in this SI “Managing recovery and resilience in organizations: the impact of employee competence and development on firm recovery” collectively advance a more integrated, multi-level perspective of resilience. Drawing inspiration from our aim to provide a deeper, more holistic appreciation of managing recovery and resilience in a range of organizational, socio-economic, cultural and politically imbued contexts, they highlight the increasing nature, scale and complexity of personal and firm operational and strategic interventions (Verreynne et al., 2023). While these may surface the extent to which organizations seek to enhance resilience-building capabilities and the role of employees' competence and development in strategically doing so (Herbane, 2019), the more nuanced aspects of resilience and recovery also deserve scholarly attention. The SI showcases the socio-political, health, environmental, governance and workplace imperatives giving rise to staff's capacity to develop their potentials and the unfolding, more nuanced processes and impacts leading to or adversely impacting organizations' overall capacity to nurture recovery and sustain resilience capabilities.In the following sections, we introduce our theoretical background and provide summaries of how each of the articles has theoretically, methodologically and practically advanced our understanding and knowledge of organizational-level resilience and recovery and propose a future research agenda of organizational resilience for this continuously evolving field.The scholarly and practical interest for this SI arose from the premise that despite the increasing academic and professional attention on resilience and organizational recovery (Kim, 2020; Duchek, 2020), its conceptualization and the impacts on organizations and society at large remain contested, under-theorized and under-researched in its methodological plurality and complexity. This academic lag offers space for research and theorization. Such gaps are particularly concerning given the increasing calls for resilience at multiple levels: personal, group and/or team, organizational, regional, national and even global (Korosteleva and Flockhart, 2020). While staff are increasingly being required to demonstrate nimbleness, agility and flexibility (as required characteristics of being resilient) in managing daily pressures and/or demands in and outside of the workplace and organizations seek to mitigate the adverse financial and non-financial consequences emanating from geo-political and economic environments under flux, the actual recovery and resilience mechanisms and processes of understanding how to do so are often lagging (Zelčāne and Pipere, 2023). Such individual and collective adversities abound in daily personal and organizational settings (Williams et al., 2017) despite the increasing proliferation and sophistication of technological advancements in workplaces, digital business and inter-firm partnership models, including human–AI interactions, algorithmic solutions, climate change management, risk mitigation models and so on (Van Der Vegt et al., 2015; Belhadi et al., 2022).Extant studies on organizational recovery and resilience reveal the significant yet contested and multi-disciplinary nature of the topic (Kuntz, 2020; Mendy and Bal, 2021). While some emerging research highlights how meta-level global disruptive factors (e.g. the COVID-19 pandemic, economic crises and geopolitical conflicts) have intensified the scrutiny into organizations' increasing vulnerabilities and the urgent need to strengthen their resilience (Lombardi et al., 2021), additional studies have highlighted the significance of exploring the impacts of meso-firm and micro-foundational individual-level factors on resilience-building capabilities (Raetze et al., 2021). Additionally, while attempts are being made by business and management scholars and practitioners to develop organizational-level resilience as the basis for such survivability capabilities (Fitriasari, 2020; Musa and Aifuwa, 2020), other scholarships have tended to place greater emphasis on the range of regulatory, governance and financial frameworks (Lengnick-Hall et al., 2011; Mendy, 2020; Mendy and Rahman, 2020; Pope and Petrova, 2017) that could boost the recommended survival mechanisms. Despite such attempts, employee-level competence and development often lag (Conz and Magnani, 2020) in enhancing organizational-level recovery.This SI solicited articles that explored how the recruitment, selection, training and development and retention of employees could facilitate the development of organizational recovery and resilience capabilities. While the intention had originally been to develop a holistic and comprehensive understanding of the multi-level relationships and dynamics that characterize, enhance and/or inhibit resilience capabilities at firm levels, the published articles under this volume revealed some additionally significant developments in the combined field of organizational recovery and resilience as a critical research endeavor. As we opted for quality in favor of quantity, and after rigorous peer-review rounds, this SI comprises three papers (Ataburo et al., 2026; Del Barone et al., 2026; Caputo et al., 2026). In the following section, we will highlight their individual and combined findings, contributions and implications regarding the role of competence management for organizational recovery and resilience.While previous research had highlighted theoretical and practical insights into organizations' capacities to develop sustainable resilience strategies and surfaced the leveraging of workforce competencies and innovative and adaptive management approaches from a micro-foundational and multi-level adoption and applications (Raetze et al., 2021), our selected articles have advanced further perspectives, extended new methods, tools and measures on resilience and recovery.For example, the study by Ataburo et al. (2026), “Differing associations between organizational training types and operational resilience,” examines how dynamic and individual capability training influence firms' ability to absorb and recover from operational disruptions. Drawing on data from Ghanaian firms, the study reveals the significance of dynamic capability training focusing on adaptability and innovation and its stronger role in enhancing resilience compared to routine, process-maintaining training. In addition, the article surfaces how job autonomy moderates these effects on individual and firm-level resilience, demonstrating that organizational resilience is contingent on both individual competence development and workplace structures that enable employees to apply their skills effectively.This study makes a significant contribution by advancing understanding of how organizational training, as a human capital development practice, relates to operational resilience. Departing from prior research that often treats training without further specifications (Brewis, 2019; Cacioppo et al., 2015), the study introduces a more nuanced conceptualization by distinguishing between ordinary capability training, which focuses on developing skills for current, routine operational tasks and dynamic capability training, which targets higher-order competencies that enable employees to create, adapt and extend organizational recovery processes in response to disruptions. By making this distinction, the study provides a more granular theoretical account of how different forms of training influence resilience outcomes. The authors ground their theorization in the ability–motivation–opportunity (AMO) framework (Paauwe, 2009), using it to explain the mechanisms through which each training type enhances employee ability and contributes to operational resilience. Importantly, the study does not treat these mechanisms as uniform; rather, it introduces job autonomy as a contextual, opportunity-enhancing factor that moderates the effects of training. In doing so, it challenges prevailing assumptions in AMO theory (Paauwe, 2009), namely, that job autonomy universally complements ability-enhancing practices like staff's training.The findings show that the interaction between training and job autonomy is contingent upon the type of training: while job autonomy strengthens the positive relationship between ordinary capability training and operational resilience, it weakens the relationship in the case of dynamic capability training. This suggests that job autonomy may act as a complement in one context and a substitute in another, offering a more differentiated understanding of how competence building helps in shaping organizational recovery and resilience outcomes. Beyond its theoretical contributions, the study enriches the training evaluation literature by focusing on operational resilience as an important but underexplored organizational-level outcome. Whereas traditional training evaluation research tends to emphasize economic or performance indicators such as productivity or efficiency (Arthur et al., 2003; Phillips, 2012; Tharenou et al., 2007), this study situates resilience specifically and highlights how disruption absorption and disruption recovery could act as critical capabilities that training may support. This contributes to the emerging literature that positions human capital as a foundational element of organizational resilience (e.g. Douglas, 2021; Pereira et al., 2020). The study also shows that not all training leads to resilience uniformly. It demonstrates that dynamic capability training has a stronger positive association with operational resilience than ordinary capability training, particularly in contexts of low job autonomy. Furthermore, the research is contextually grounded in a developing country (Ghana), where structural and cultural factors (e.g. collectivist norms and resource scarcity) shape the effectiveness (or otherwise) of training and autonomy in unique ways. As such, the study extends the generalizability of the impact of employee competence development on organizational resilience to non-Western, resource-constrained settings (Agyemang et al., 2023) and offers important insights for both the theory and practice of organizational recovery and resilience.The study by Del Barone et al. (2026) builds on and deepens existing discussions about the strategic role of human resource management (HRM) systems in fostering resilience (Belso-Martinez et al., 2018; Baptiste, 2008). The study explores the significance of artificial intelligence (AI) integration in HRM and investigates its capacity to enhance organizational resilience in public administrations. Framed using the technology–organization–environment (TOE) framework (Baker, 2012), the research examines the multi-dimensional interactions among technological tools, organizational resources and environmental dynamics in (re)shaping the organizational resilient responses to uncertainty. Through a qualitative methodology contextualized in Italian public administration and based on 43 in-depth interviews, multi-stakeholder focus groups and extensive documentary analysis, the study provides a rich interpretive account of how AI-enabled transformation unfolds in HR.Interestingly, the core findings reveal that managerial competencies are critical levers for enabling transformational leadership. Furthermore, competencies such as strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, change management and values-based leadership were considered critical in not only facilitating the adoption of AI but also in (re)shaping its strategic use particularly around the fostering of critical organizational resilience building factors, such as employee engagement, crises response and operational efficiency. Moreover, by challenging the traditional depiction of public administrations as rigid or path-dependent systems, the study presents an alternative context-sensitive perspective of the public sector as a dynamic and responsive actor, where resilience is built through the deliberate interplay between technological tools and human agency. The study identifies four key dimensions of resilience development, namely that (1) the integration of AI into HRM can improve recruitment; (2) training and performance management foster resilience; (3) the development of key managerial competencies helps to support effective AI adoption to strengthen crisis response, operational efficiency and employee engagement and (4) overcoming cultural and structural barriers, such as resistance to change and digital skills gaps serves as a maintaining and sustaining aspect for organizational resilience and recovery.Theoretically, firstly this article advances the TOE framework (Baker, 2012; Awa et al., 2017) by offering an empirically grounded explanation of how technological capabilities, organizational factors and environmental pressures interact in the digital transformation of public sector organizations. This extension is particularly valuable, as the TOE framework has rarely been applied onto public sector innovation, where institutional inertia and external scrutiny have been understood to create unique implementation barriers (Cordella and Paletti, 2019; Clement et al., 2023; Fischer et al., 2023). Secondly, the paper contributes to resilience theory by conceptualizing resilience as an organizational-level capability that proactively and strategically harnesses individuals' adaptability rather than a merely response to crises et al., 2018; and 2012; and Magnani, 2020). 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