Do empowered employees boost organizational resilience? a case study in the Dutch home care industry

There is a growing interest in the notion of organizational resilience among both scholars and practitioners. But previous work in this area has failed to produce a comprehensive definition of organizational resilience and empirically establish the influence of empowerment on resilience. This paper addresses this gap, by scrutinizing the effects of empowerment on organizational resilience in an in-depth case study in a Dutch home care organization. The study provides a novel multi-level perspective on the dimensions of organizational resilience that are driven by two types of empowerment: formal and informal empowerment. Specifically, the study shows that the type of empowerment as well as the type of resilience differs between organizational layers. This study therefore contributes by providing an in-depth understanding of how organizations can enhance their resilience by empowering their members.