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Resilience and Organizational Limits in the High-risk Nuclear Industry Context

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis renewed scholarly interest in organizational resilience. To ensure resilience, organizations must develop the ability to proactively prepare for ambiguous and unexpected situations (Morel et al., 2008). From this perspective, resilience may be considered as a mindful process leading to reliability (Linnenluecke, 2017) where mindfulness allows to collectively manage stability/vividness tension and extend individual limits of attention (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2006, 2007). A high level of environmental uncertainty increases the risk and may lead to violations of organizational limits (Farjoun & Starbuck, 2007). In addition to the exogenous environmental limits, organizations are affected by the endogenous limits of cognition and managerial control, and also by the non-cognitive factors such as habitus. However, many questions remain. Following a recent call for further research on organizing for resilience (Linnenluecke, 2017, p. 26), the aims of our paper is to explore how the organizational limits restraint the development of mindfulness (foresight and cognition) and how organizations deal with those limits to develop the resilience? We conducted a qualitative case study within a major European nuclear power plant. We wanted to better understand how in a highly controlled and regulated industry managers increase resilience by pushing of organizational limits. Our analysis shows that implemented practices constrained endogenous organizational limits instead of helping to extend them. Our paper highlights the role of mindfulness and attention in building resilience and tensions between managed and regulated safety. The obligation of result (e.g., reliable practice) is in tension with the obligation of means (e.g., procedure to follow). Moreover, our case study illustrates negative effect of organizational context on the extension of the organizational limits. In addition, we enrich the notion of endogenous limits by adding the non-cognitive dimension of habitus of the nuclear energy industry. We believe that a better understanding of organizational limits to develop resilience may offer managers the opportunity to better consider the role of organizational context and to adapt training programs. © ESREL 2021. Published by Research Publishing, Singapore.