Towards Reliable Resilience Metrics in Corporate Settings: Content Validity Considerations

Abstract

Background: Firm resilience is a critical concept for organisations aiming to navigate disruptions effectively, yet its translation into regularly applicable metrics remains underdeveloped. Thus, existing frameworks often lack systematic validation and fail to capture resilience's dynamic nature across various disruptions, hindering managers' confident implementation of resilience strategies.  Objectives: This study aims to identify a content-valid and practical metric for measuring firm resilience, applicable across diverse firm contexts and disruptions. Approach: The research evaluates and compares existing metrics, based on their alignment with a newly proposed axiom system, to identify the most suitable measure for assessing firm resilience in post-disruption contexts. Results: The metric assessment revealed that the Dominance axiom posed the greatest challenge, with only two metrics fully satisfying the requirement. The semi-quantitative Likert scales encountered further issues with the Operationalisation axiom because of their unsettled interpretation as either ordinal or interval scales, a problem not observed with purely quantitative metrics. Conclusions: The BRAVE metric emerged as the most reliable for evaluating firm resilience, owing to its flexibility in accommodating varying time horizons. Future research should test the metric in real-world settings and explore potential simplifications or additional axioms to refine the resilience measurement framework.