Recovery is commonly treated as an individual process that occurs after work, during breaks, or through personal boundary management. That framing is incomplete when workload, temporal control, social support, and coordination are organized collectively and when one employee’s ability to disengage depends on the availability and actions of others. This Original Conceptual Theory Article develops a proposed Theory of Organizational Recovery Systems to reposition recovery as a work-system problem as well as an individual experience. The theory integrates recovery research with job demands–resources reasoning, multilevel work design, relational resource processes, temporal work organization, and interdependence. It proposes that sustainable recovery depends on four linked system functions: demand containment, usable temporal release, relational replenishment, and coordination of recovery across interdependent roles. A fifth mechanism, recovery legitimacy, concerns whether formally available recovery opportunities can be used without covert penalties, workload escalation, or relational sanctions. Eight propositions specify conditional relationships among these mechanisms, accumulated strain, workload transfer, and sustainable functioning. The article distinguishes formal policy from enacted practice, individual recovery from organization-level recoverability, social care from structural workload correction, and conceptual plausibility from empirical validation. The theory is not presented as a validated causal model or universal prescription. Its principal contribution is to define organizational recovery as a proposed multilevel and temporally recursive system property whose measurement and effects require longitudinal, multilevel, and work-redesign research.
