Measuring organizational resilience: Tracing disruptive events facing unconventional oil and gas enterprise performance in the Americas

Over the last few decades, organizations have to cope with high uncertainties and extreme events like the Covid-19 pandemic, demand collapse, or supply chain disruptions with different capabilities to handle them. This work provides empirical evidence to test organizational resilience to deal with turbulent environments by studying firms' performance in unconventional oil and gas development in North America and Latin America. The 2014–2015 and 2019–2020 hydrocarbon price collapse allow us to measure resilience potential based on the organizational recovery after suffering a disruptive event. Only in the US, oil and gas output increased 10 million barrels of equivalent oil per day, despite high costs, low returns, and growing funding needs. Companies had to innovate, adapt, and manage uncertainty to optimize production, reduce costs and risk exposure, and generate positive cash flows. The fragile disappeared, the robust and resilient survived, and the antifragile thrived. This paper aims to define customary indicators to measure organizations' resilience after an extreme event. It also provides a scale that offers an approach to rank organizations and contrasts the most distinctive managerial attributes for successful and failed companies to deal with uncertain environments.