A Framework of Business Recovery in the Aftermath of a Disaster

The issue of business recovery in the aftermath of a disaster has attracted the interest of many pundits. There is a general scarcity of models and frameworks for evaluating organisational recovery efforts. This paper proposes a framework to predict organisation’s performance following a disaster. Based on the disaster life cycle, a five concept model is proposed. The cycle consists of three phases: pre-disaster, disaster and post disaster. While organisational characteristics and preparedness characterised the pre-disaster phase, impact and recovery conceptualised the aftermath phase of a disaster. Organisational performance is proposed as a dependent variable to recovery efforts and its relationships with organisation characteristics, preparedness, impact and recovery are defined and discussed. Further research into developing, validating and empirically testing the model is proposed.