Mutual Aid,Relationship Maintenance And Organizational Resilience

In uncertain environment, enterprises cannot predict what kind of resources they need accurately. They need dynamic resource flow to develop and keep their competitiveness continuously. Dominated by relationship, organizational members carry out daily mutual aid behaviors by taking care of each other's feeling and holding shared emotion. These mutual aid behaviors can not only help organizations access what the resources they need in current guanxi practice, but explore current guanxi mood to create opportunities to obtain available resources in future uncertain contextThis paper explored the functional mechanism of the mutual aid to the flow of resource by qualitative study, and then described the organizational resilience from the perspective of resource flow. I joined and observed a firm in the field by a longitudinal survey nearly one year, and recorded the daily communications and practices of the organizational members. Then I coded the data by grounded theory and put forward three types of mutual aid, and analyzed the functional mechanism of different ways of mutual aid to the resource flow and the influence fo relationship.The findings indicated that the mutual aid behavior driven by tasks between employees was in favor of getting instrumental resources, and the mutual aid behavior driven by human emotion and social identity were in favor of getting affective resources. We also found that mutual aid behaviors were oriented by interpersonal relationship. Mutual aid behaviors were more likely to exist in members with closer relationship. And they will acquire deeper degree of resource. Besides, the affective resources flowed more frequently between them who were also with smaller status gap. This study showed that organization followed strategic practice logic which embedded in the daily activities. The mutual aid behavious carried out by organizational members favoured to solve the difficulties of organizations. And these mutual aid behaviors can not only help organizations access what the resources they need for survivability, but maintain and explore current guanxi mood to create opportunities to develop and obtain available resources in future uncertain context. And at the same time these behaviors improve the power of organizational resilience in the progress of resource flow.