The Resilience Responsibility Gap: how institutions distribute the burden of adaptation under AI-driven structural disruption

AI-drivenworkforce disruption is structural rather than episodic and is reshaping skills, tasks, job roles, career prospects and job stability. Resilience research has traditionally focused on individuals, yet adaptation is required at the individual, organizational, institutional and societal levels. This study examines who is held responsible for adaptation in institutional documents and whether the demands placed on workers are matched by accessible resources.

A structured, codebook-based comparative document analysis was conducted on 18 publications from the OECD (n = 9), Eurofound (n = 5), EU-OSHA (n = 2), the European Commission's Joint Research Center (n = 1) and the International Labor Organization (n = 1). Published between 2021 and 2026, the documents were selected purposively, and the corpus is dominated by OECD and EU institutions. They were coded with a 28-field codebook, supported by a page-level audit trail, in two separate coding passes conducted by the author.

In this corpus, no document assigned workers primary responsibility for adaptation, and individual responsibility was never coded as central; both passes classified all 18 documents as non-individual-dominant. The distribution across the four balance categories is reported in the Results and should be interpreted cautiously, since the passes agreed on the exact category in 10 of 18 documents. A Resilience Responsibility Gap, defined as a mismatch between adaptation demands, resources and responsibility, was clear in seven documents, possible or limited in eight and absent in three. Five inductively identified subtypes concern access to skills, worker participation, psychosocial prevention, social protection and organizational capacity. Psychological Capital did not appear as an explicit construct in any document, although related resources such as self-efficacy, adaptability, coping and trust did.

Psychological capital was not measured here, so its structural conditioning is advanced as a theoretical proposition rather than a demonstrated finding: the association between psychological capital and sustainable adaptation is expected to be moderated by the organizational and institutional resource configuration, a proposition for future testing. Workforce resilience is accordingly conceptualized as distributed adaptive capacity, arising from the alignment between adaptation demands and the individual, organizational and institutional resources available to meet them.