Brief Organisational Resilience Scale (BORS): Development and Validity in Spain and Austria

Abstract

There are many inconsistencies in the conceptualisation and measurement of organisational resilience. Existing measures often focus on either the ability or process perspective, limiting their comprehensiveness, and failing to capture the multifaceted nature of resilience. Furthermore, many of these measures and their psychometric properties have not been appropriately validated and they focused on specific organisations and countries, which limits its usability to other work contexts. This study aims to provide a measure that uses the main approaches in the literature and to validate this in a cross-cultural sample of 1435 employees from 138 organisations in two European countries (Spain and Austria). The data were randomly split in two independent subsamples (Sample 1: Explorative; Sample 2: Confirmative). The exploratory factor analysis had a bi-dimensional factorial structure consisting of the dimensions of ability and process. Confirmatory factor analysis replicated this bi-dimensional structure by presenting better goodness of fit indices than the alternative one-factor model. Reliabilities were acceptable for ability and process dimensions in both countries. Convergent validity was also adequate for the two dimensions in both countries with satisfactory AVE and CR. In addition, significant correlations were found in both countries between organisational resilience and organisational commitment and job satisfaction. Finally, discriminant validity was also appropriate. This study is relevant for researchers and practitioners because it provides a useful tool for advancing understanding of organisational resilience and for assessing how resilient organisations are.