Digital Resilience: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Configurational Perspective

Abstract
Digital resilience refers to the ability of users to shield against and recover from adversity in the IT work environment, which we conceptualize as comprising two dimensions: shielding and recovery. In this paper, we report three studies with different methods that build an understanding of digital resilience. Study 1 develops and validates digital resilience measures and confirms them with initial tests. Study 2 uses interviews to identify five personal (e.g., conscientiousness, IT mindfulness, IT self-efficacy, trust in IT) and two environmental factors (e.g., forbearance) relevant to digital resilience. Study 3 employs fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to identify configurations of factors contributing to shielding and recovery. Collectively, our studies (1) position digital resilience as a unique concept, (2) offer interested researchers an empirically validated scale that can be (3) used to explain how users react to jarring events, and (4) develop a theory of digital resilience that (5) identifies multiple equifinal configurations of factors contributing to shielding and one contributing to recovery, and (6) points to necessary factors for supporting digital resilience. By so doing, we identify opportunities for future research, such as how to create resilient sociotechnical systems.

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