Organizational resilience in the face of disruptive forces: a model for building robustness of firms in financial services sector

Highly dynamic and turbulent business environments of today demand almost all the organizations in the world to be more resilient than ever before. Resilience has become the new buzzword in today’s world, with the advent of various disruptive forces and suddenly emerged pandemics, such as COVID-19. Among the industrial sectors that are destined to be under the pressure of those disruptions, health services sector and financial services sector are of utmost importance. Therefore, organizations need to be more robust or resilient and in order to do so, they have to formulate appropriate corporate and business strategies after identifying the drivers or sources contributing towards the emergence of the resilience in an organizational context. Based on the prevailing theoretical underpinnings from prior literature sources, this paper proposes a conceptual framework to further understand the antecedents of organizational resilience in order to enhance the overall business performance of the firms in the financial services industry in Sri Lanka. In this conceptual model, sources of organizational resilience are classified as resilient leadership, resilient organizational culture, adaptation capacity, organizational capacity and managerial capabilities. The proposed organizational resilience conceptual framework will also pave the way for various theoretical and empirical implications

Impact of corporate governance on financial innovation: a conceptual framework model

This paper presents a conceptual framework that could be applied to the relevant empirical research studies on the relative importance of the concept of corporate governance in order to strengthen the innovative practices in financial services industry. The main data and information for the development of this model is obtained from of the available literature, web sites and supplemented with interviews conducted with key relevant stake holders in financial sector. Thus, this research framework could be utilized to examine the corporate governance and innovation related issues in the other industrial sectors though it has been originally designed for the financial services industry

Seasonal allergic rhinitis and systems biology-oriented biomarker discovery

There is an increasing interest in science and medicine in the systems approach. Instead of the reductionist approach that focuses on the physical and chemical properties of the individual components, systems biology aims to describe, understand, and explain from the complex biological systems that are studied: All levels of structural and functional complexity, explicitly including the supracellular domain; their systems behavior or phenotypes; their networks with relationships that interact with the genome, the environment, and the phenotype; and their multifactorial processes involved in maintaining homeostasis and the breakdown of homeostasis within the system. This shift from a more reductionist to a more holistic approach on both the epistemological (theoretical) and the methodological level is also important for the conceptualization and the development of biomarkers. Based on the dataset of a randomized controlled trial on the effects of a treatment of seasonal allergic rhinitis, using five different methods of permuted stepwise regression, three systems biology-oriented immunological pattern variables (biomarkers) were developed that demonstrated larger CV correct values than the separate cytokines with regard to the classification of cytokine samples in baseline (before treatment) and post-baseline (after treatment). This example demonstrates that a systems biological approach in both the conceptualization and development of biomarkers is promising. However, more empirical studies with larger datasets are necessary to confirm the positive results of the presented study.</p