Building project organizational resilience under extreme weather: Multisource insights from subway construction projects in China

Abstract

Frequent extreme weather events not only threaten the safety of subway engineering construction but also pose severe challenges to project organizations. Facing continuous external shocks, enhancing organizational resilience (OR) has become a promising way for subway projects to effectively address climate risks. However, the existing theoretical understanding of OR in subway projects remains limited, and there is a lack of empirical evidence explaining how OR can be systematically constructed to cope with extreme weather. To this end, this study employed web crawling and expert interviews to collect multi-stakeholder interview data and diverse historical materials that characterize OR in subway projects under extreme weather events. Based on this, topic modeling techniques and focus group discussions were employed to model and optimize multi-source data, analyzing the structural, distributional, and multi-stakeholder differentiation characteristics of OR in subway projects. The findings show that OR in subway projects represents a collective capability composed of perceptual, planning, coping, adaptive, recovery, and bounce-forward learning capabilities, encompassing 43 dimensions. Among these, planning capability serves as the primary foundation for shaping OR, while bounce-forward learning capability provides critical support for transitioning from reactive response to proactive leapfrogging. Additionally, the five key stakeholders exhibit different patterns of OR, yet each plays a unique role in collaboratively constructing OR. This study not only advances the theoretical understanding of the multidimensional characteristics of OR in subway projects but also provides practical insights for project stakeholders in formulating targeted strategies to enhance resilience.

Keywords

organizational resilience / project organization / subway construction project / extreme weather

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

Higher Education Press 2026

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