View article

The COVID-19 health crisis and subsequent government lockdowns resulted in an unexpected stock market crash in the United States with prices declining by almost 37% in the space of one month1. Resilience improves firm capacity to survive in the face of external adverse events and adapt to environmental changes (DesJardine et al., 2019). Despite the importance of organizational resilience, especially given the likelihood of even more disruptions in future linked with extreme weather events (Linnenluecke et al., 2012), empirical research on antecedents of firm resilience is scarce (Van der Vegt et al., 2015).

Social and environmental practices can positively contribute to organizational resilience (Ortiz‐de‐Mandojana and Bansal, 2016; DesJardine et al. 2019). We argue that not all social and environmental practices will have the same effect. Focussing on target setting, studies find that firm sustainability targets are often designed to make incremental improvements, but can lack ambition (Rietbergen et al. 2015) and achieve little performance improvement (Dahlmann et al., 2019; Maas, 2018). Rather, it has been argued that firm commitments should be more closely linked with the ecological context and should be based on ecological resilience to “maintain corporate impacts within global thresholds”(Haffar & Searcy, 2018, p. 1080) and planetary boundaries (Whiteman et al., 2013). Such targets can help firms to better mitigate and adapt to risks such as climate change (Haffar & Searcy, 2018). We argue that commitments, based on ecological resilience rather than more firm-centric targets will contribute to organizational resilience in times of …