Systematic literature review on the impact of multifunctional training on organizational resilience

Abstract

This systematic literature review examines how multifunctional training (MT) contributes to organisational resilience (OR) and how this relationship has been modelled and measured. Following PRISMA procedures, 87 studies were synthesised through descriptive analysis and a structured qualitative coding framework addressing three research questions. First, we map the methodological approaches used to study the MT–OR relationship and assess the extent to which uncertainty and human and organisational aspects are explicitly incorporated. Second, we synthesise the enablers and barriers affecting MT implementation and operationalisation, coding only mechanisms that are modelled, measured, or empirically reported. Third, we consolidate the metric families used to evaluate MT’s contribution to organisational resilience. Results show that the literature predominantly operationalises MT as a skill-coverage architecture and assesses resilience through operational performance proxies under variability (e.g., flow time, work in progress, tardiness, service level, utilisation). Explicit barriers most frequently relate to cost and feasibility frictions (training cost, productivity loss, robustness–cost trade-offs), while coordination mechanisms, organisational conditions, and competence dynamics are less consistently formalised. Overall, the evidence highlights a measurement gap: resilience benefits are widely reported but rarely quantified end-to-end under uncertainty with deployability and human dynamics. The review proposes an agenda for integrating uncertainty-aware modelling with organisational and behavioural realism to enable comparable, decision-relevant evaluation of MT as a resilience strategy.