Human capital and organisational resilience in the context of manufacturing: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Purpose

The manufacturing sector is well known for its significance in upholding the economic prosperity of many nations. However, in today's unprecedented environment, the resilience of this sector has become vulnerable to relentless catastrophic events, thus gaining a serious concern among the economies driven by this sector. Albeit the various determinants, human capital emerges as the widely accepted core factor that holds the key to proliferate organisational resilience. Therefore, the present systematic literature review seeks to intensify the understanding of the link between human capital and organisational resilience in the manufacturing context.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper systematically reviews the studies converging human capital and organisational resilience in the context of manufacturing from the year 2011 to 2021 based on the PRISMA protocol. A bibliographic coupling analysis was carried out using VOSviewer software to expose the main research themes and trends concerning the relationship.

Findings

The bibliographic coupling analysis discovered links between publications to produce a framework outlining a holistic state-of-art of the literature intersecting human capital and organisational resilience. The analysis identified main research themes by clustering the prior studies into seven groups, which describe the direction of the literature.

Originality/value

This study offers a novel framework and in-depth understanding to the research community to delve into the interrelationship between human capital and organisational resilience research. Guided by the gaps in the literature, a set of outstanding avenues for the forthcoming studies are also proposed.