There are questions as to whether a causal relationship exists between disaster planning and effective adaptive behaviors in crisis. Traditional planning has viewed the contingency plan as an outcome of a process to be utilized in a step-by-step fashion during a crisis. This dissertation challenges this orthodox view and suggests a new paradigm, one that focuses on creating organizational structures and processes that build organizational resilience potential. The purpose of this research is to theoretically and empirically connect the concept of high reliability organizational theory to a study of how one organized planning approach—continuity of operations planning—may help build latent resilience in organizations.

Several research questions reflect two empirical objectives of this dissertation. The descriptive objective is to characterize the prevalence of continuity of operations planning, as well as document the level of organizational resilience potential measured in a population of municipal organizations. The theoretical objective seeks to develop a scale to measure latent resilience in organizations and explore the relationship between six independent variables and measured organizational resilience potential. An Organizational Resilience Potential Scale (ORPS) was constructed based on the work of Larry Mallak, who tested several factors that measure dimensions of latent resilience in organizations. A questionnaire was mailed to a population of full-service, municipal public works departments in the southwest United States.

Scale Item Analysis verified that the ORPS contained statistically additive items, and a test-retest technique demonstrated its reliability. Pearson's product-moment correlation coefficient and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to examine the strength and direction of the bi-variate relationships posed in the research question. In addition, multiple regression analysis was used to examine the impact of all the independent variables acting upon ORPS scores. The results of these analyses support the relationships of three predictors to organizational resilience potential. While these findings cannot be generalized beyond this population, this exploratory and descriptive research begins to build a critical foundation of knowledge with which to consider whether a move toward a new paradigm in disaster planning—one based on building organizational resilience potential—should be the focus of future research.