In an Era of Post-Pandemic Uncertainty, the Imperative of Organizational Resilience Comes to the Fore. As organizations navigate a volatile and uncertain post-pandemic world, the importance of resilience has become increasingly evident. How to effectively build agile organizations and drive high-quality, sustainable development has emerged as a pressing topic for enterprises worldwide. On February 6, the 2023 Annual Forum of emlyon business school’s Global Human Resources and Organizational Innovation Center (GHOIC) was grandly held in Shanghai. Distinguished attendees—including professors, scholars, doctoral candidates, and Global DBA participants from Shanghai’s top business schools, alongside HR executives from leading corporations and representatives of industry associations—gathered to explore “Organizational Resilience in the Wake of Pandemic Disruption.” The event sparked dynamic high-level dialogues and fostered a convergence of insights from industry, academia, and research.

Co-hosted by emlyon business school, the Global Human Resources and Organizational Innovation Center (GHOIC), and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics’ Research Team on Leadership and Organizational Innovation in the Digital Economy, the forum received strategic support from EY, HRflag, VHR Intelligence Alliance, and the Empower Management Institute. In a pivotal closing session, participants jointly launched the “Global Initiative for Industry-Academia-Research Collaboration in HR and Organizational Innovation,” paving the way for integrating global resources, deepening cross-sector partnerships, empowering enterprise growth, and advancing talent development.

▲ Professor Wang Hua addressed the forum

At the outset of the event, Professor WANG Hua—Vice President of emlyon business school, Asian President of emlyon, and French Dean of the Asia-Europe Business School—alongside Ms. Wang Yang, Partner of EY Human Capital Consulting and alumna of emlyon’s MBA program, delivered opening addresses for the 2023 Annual Forum of emlyon’s Global Human Resources and Organizational Innovation Center (GHOIC). Professor WANG emphasized that in the post-pandemic era, creating open platforms to engage key leaders from academia and industry is a vital approach to deepening industry-academia-research collaboration. Ms. Wang Yang noted that the pandemic has infused new dimensions into organizational innovation, adding that AI-driven breakthroughs in organizational resilience will be a critical focus for the future.

▲ Ms. WANG Yang addressed the forum

Academic Insights · Foreseeing the Future

During the keynote session, Professor Nikos Bozionelos, Director of emlyon business school's Global Human Resources and Organizational Innovation Center, Professor of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behavior, and DBA Supervisor, delivered a video presentation titled "Sustainability and Employee Performance." Addressing the challenges of today's rapidly evolving society, Professor Bozionelos emphasized that HR professionals must embrace sustainable concepts in workforce management—extending beyond traditional metrics to encompass employee satisfaction, adaptability, and work-life balance as fundamental pillars of organizational success.

▲ Nikos Bozionelos shared online

Professor CHEN Zhijun, Head of the Department of Human Resource Management and Academic Director of the MBA Center at the Business School of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, gave a wonderful share on the theme of "Work reshaping and its value to society, organizations and individuals".

In his share, he said that not only work can be reshaped, but also the theoretical understanding of work reshaped. Combining ontology and flow theory, Professor Chen Zhijun's research group proposed a cross-layer flow model to explain the spillover effect of job reshaping, and then combined the two research models to analyze the practical ways of job reshaping to improve organizational human effectiveness.

▲ Professor CHEN Zhijun shared the topic

Professor GUAN Haoguang, associate professor of management at China Europe International Business School, said in the sharing on the theme of "How Team mindfulness promotes team creativity in Adversity" that team creativity determines the survival and success of an organization. How to promote team creativity under adversity becomes an important issue. Based on a questionnaire survey of 100 teams in China, this study found that team mindfulness has a positive effect on team creativity.

▲ Professor GUAN Haoguang shared the topic

Professor CHU Rongwei, Deputy Director of the Department of Marketing of Fudan University and Secretary-General of China Marketing Research Center of Fudan University, brought a wonderful sharing on the theme of "Job reshaping under Service robots: Alternative vs Enhancement".

The core challenge of digitization in service organizations is that the application of AI robots or algorithms is not a trade-off (job substitution or job empowerment), but a simultaneous (sometimes substitution and sometimes empowerment), in which the organization's managers, employees, and customers all need to learn to adapt to changing roles.

▲ Professor CHU Rongwei shared the topic

Professor MENG Liang, Professor at the School of International Business Administration, Shanghai International Studies University and Director of the Department of Management and Organization at the School of International Business Administration, Shanghai International Studies University, presented a wonderful sharing on the theme of "Action Moment: The adoption of artificial Intelligence technology in the Workplace and employees' Job Reshaping Behavior".

The adoption of AI technology in the workplace will make employees feel threatened and trigger psychological compensation mechanisms. As a coping strategy, employees will form a stronger need for positive self-image and make proactive behaviors such as job remodeling driven by it.

▲ Professor MENG Liang shared the topic

Dr. TANG Weimin, Founder of Rayue Consulting and Associate Director of emlyon business school's Global Human Resources & Organizational Innovation Center, shared insights on "Team Agility, Shared Leadership, Team Performance and the Moderating Effects of Work Complexity".

In his presentation, Dr. Tang emphasized, team agility necessitates the capability to respond to complex and dynamic demands through rapid decision-making and goal adaptation.

▲ Dr. TANG Weimin shared the topic

Industry Exploration · Innovative Practices

The forum transitioned into an insightful roundtable discussion moderated by Ms. Wang Yang, Partner at EY Human Capital Consulting and emlyon MBA alumna. The distinguished panel included:

• Professor CHEN Zhijun – Dean of HR Management Department and Academic Director of MBA Center, SUFE Business School
• Dr. YIN Tianran – President of Frontier Executive Coaching Academy, Expert in Evidence-based Executive Coaching, Cross-cultural Leadership Development, and Change Management
• Dr. TANG Weimin – Founder of Rayue Consulting, Associate Director of emlyon's Global HR & Organizational Innovation Center
• Ms. YU Zhihong – APAC HR Director at Cabot Corporation, Current GDBA Candidate

The panel delved into the critical theme: "Building Organizational Resilience and Agility: Strategies for the New Era"

▲ From left to right: Ms. WANG Yang, Professor CHEN Zhijun, Dr. YIN Tianran, Dr. TANG Weimin, and Ms. YU Zhihong

Ms. WANG Yang stated that self-satisfaction is one of the greatest challenges in organizational transformation, and the need for agile leadership and preparedness has never been higher. She emphasized that thinking, planning, and acting are three essential steps for organizations to reshape their future. In terms of thinking, the key is to establish an adaptive and resilient mindset while possessing the right leadership capabilities in all situations. For planning, the focus should be on creating a platform for organizational transformation. When it comes to action, the priority is to restructure with flexibility and build optionality.

Professor CHEN Zhijun interpreted organizational resilience from three perspectives. First, it involves emergency response and recovery capabilities for specific events. Second, resilience stems from intrinsic abilities to effectively address diverse challenges. Finally, resilience manifests when these capabilities are externalized into culture and behaviors.

Dr. YIN Tianran proposed that organizations require agile resilience—the ability to effectively respond to immediate challenges while simultaneously building innovative organizational capabilities for the future. To develop highly resilient enterprises, organizations need to focus on five dimensions: Strategy, Capital, Relationship, Culture, and Leadership, ensuring synchronous improvement across all areas.

Dr. TANG Weimin emphasized that, from a behavioral perspective, organizational resilience can be objectively understood as an organization's ability to adjust its strategy in real-time to match market changes. This involves promptly integrating internal resources to capture emerging opportunities for growth.

Ms. YU Zhihong described organizational resilience as both an enterprise's ability to recover from changes, pressures, and challenges, and its capacity to identify opportunities and achieve sustained growth during this process.

During the post-panel sharing session, Mr. YU Wentao, HR Director for Asia at Roquette, Secretary-General of emlyon business school's Global Human Resources and Organizational Innovation Center, and current GDBA candidate, delivered an insightful presentation on "Dyad Job Crafting." He explained that job crafting should move beyond conventional talent inventory approaches and instead promote "position inventory" to comprehensively optimize person-position matching. This requires starting at the job design level and reshaping positions through dimensions such as role value, thereby enhancing psychological empowerment and organizational efficiency.

▲ Mr. YU Wentao's shared the topic

Ms. FAN Qingyue, PhD candidate at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, presented her research on "The Evolution of Team Innovation Through Design Thinking Interventions: A Team Learning Perspective Case Study." She demonstrated how design thinking interventions that bridge academia, industry and research can create synergistic value between scholarly and corporate objectives.

▲ Ms. FAN Qingyue shared the topic

Mr. QIAN Guoxin, Co-founder of Daohe Corporate Services and current GDBA candidate, shared his findings on "The Illusion of Conformity in Person-Team Fit and Its Impact on Executive Voice, Work Meaningfulness and Innovative Work Behavior." His research revealed that greater alignment and fit among organizational components leads to higher operational efficiency and more effective vision realization.

▲ Mr. QIAN Guoxin shared the topic

Industry-Academia Collaboration · Value Co-Creation

The event culminated with Mr. Tang Qiuyong, Co-Director of emlyon business school's Global HR & Organization Innovation Center (GHOIC), introducing the initiative's background. Following a solemn reading by Mr. Qian Guoxin, the "Global Industry-Academia-Research Value Co-Creation Initiative on HR & Organizational Innovation" was officially launched.

▲Mr. TANG Qiuyong introduced the initiative background

▲Mr. QIAN Guoxin read the initiative

The initiative actively responds to the demands of The Times for enterprise transformation and organizational innovation. With the vision and mission of further stimulating talent vitality, decoding the inherent laws of human resources and organizational innovation, exploring empirical research paths, and realizing innovation-driven development, the initiative aims to lead by advocating practice, return to the source of theory, construct industry-university alliance, jointly empower enterprises, and build student-oriented leaders. We will help enterprises continue to break through, achieve a win-win situation between academic value and commercial value, and make due contributions to the transformation and upgrading of China's economy and the strategy of rejuvenating the country through science and education.

Global Industry-Academia-Research Value Co-creation Initiative on Human Resources and Organizational Innovation

Let us join hands to advance corporate human resources and organizational innovation through our beliefs, concepts and actions, contributing to China's national strategy of revitalizing through science and education!

• Advocate practice-led approaches
• Return to theoretical foundations
• Build industry-academia alliances
• Jointly empower enterprises
• Cultivate scholar-industry leaders

Led by emlyon business school and jointly initiated by professors, scholars, doctoral candidates, and GDBA alumni from Shanghai's top business schools, along with HR executives from renowned enterprises and industry association representatives, this initiative represents another milestone achievement in emlyon business school's Asia industry-academia framework construction. It will generate tremendous industry influence and far-reaching exemplary effects in promoting deep industry-academia-research connections in the global human resources and organizational innovation field.

▲ Group photo of initiative founders

This year's annual forum highly condensed the latest cutting-edge insights from experts and scholars of multiple top domestic business schools and senior executives from leading enterprises. With its highly forward-looking and strategic perspective, it provided numerous practical innovative ideas and implementation paths for effectively building corporate resilience and agility in the future, as well as fully stimulating organizational internal drive and talent vitality.

Global HR & Organization Innovation Center

Established in 1872, emlyon business school is one of Europe's oldest business schools and among the global 1% of business schools that hold all three major international accreditations (AACSB, EQUIS, AMBA). The school has six campuses in Lyon, Paris, Saint-Étienne, Shanghai, Casablanca, and Bhubaneswar, with 35,700 alumni across 130 countries and academic partnerships with 190 universities and institutions worldwide.

The Global Human Resources and Organizational Innovation Research Center (GHOIC) at emlyon business school conducts research projects focusing on organizational development, HR technology, employer branding, and the new ecosystem of HR services. As an international HR think tank, it closely leverages emlyon's faculty resources in human and organizational fields and collaborates with the emlyon business school Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Management (AIM) to create an open research and innovation platform for deep interaction between the world's leading scholars and corporate executives in the field of human resources and organizations.

Career & Leadership Club

Adhering to the philosophy of "practicing lifelong learning to achieve lifelong growth," emlyon business school's Career & Leadership Club aims to help alumni enhance personal influence and unleash unlimited potential through leadership development. The club connects, empowers, and enables alumni by organizing a series of engaging online and offline activities focused on leadership development and career advancement.

For cooperation with the research center or alumni club, please contact:

Jessica Li 李老师

Associate Director of Alumni & Corporate Relations, emlyon business school Asia Campus

Telephone: +8621-62608176

Email: yli@em-lyon.com

Global DBA (Asia Track)

With rapid technological advancements and unpredictable global developments, lifelong learning has become the right path for individuals to adapt to social changes and achieve personal development in this uncertain era. emlyon business school's Global DBA (GDBA) program focuses on academic education through practice-oriented courses, complemented by a unique industry-academia-research triple helix cultivation system. It is designed to provide business leaders with new methods and ideas to address current challenges, explore new mysteries of the business world together, and gain management wisdom. It also opens paths for transformation for business leaders seeking personal reinvention and personal branding.

For more information about the GDBA program, please contact:

喻老师 Helen YU

Tel: +86 137 6418 6470

E-mail：DBA@em-lyon.com.cn

Address: emlyon business school Asia Campus

3rd Floor of the International Education Building in East China Normal University, 3663 North Zhongshan Road, Shanghai 200062