Reaction or anticipation? Resilience in small- and medium-sized enterprises

Abstract

Purpose

Building on the recent capability-based conceptualisation of resilience, this paper aims to explore whether the experience of a previous crisis and entrepreneur resilience are associated with Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs') adoption of different anticipation strategies for adversities.

Design/methodology/approach

Using original survey data on 959 Italian and German SMEs, the research uses a multinomial logistic regression model in order to test the influence of the prior experience of a crisis and the entrepreneur resilience on the likelihood of adopting different anticipation strategies.

Findings

The paper shows that the previous experience of a crisis increases the likelihood of regularly adopting proactive but non-formalised anticipation actions while decreasing the likelihood of adopting a pure reactive strategy to adversities; in addition, entrepreneur resilience is nonlinearly associated with anticipation strategies.

Originality/value

The main originalities rely on eschewing a pure binary view in relation to the organisational choice of adopting a reactive or a proactive approach towards adversities and on considering the entrepreneur resilience as a factor with both “bright” and “dark” side effects in relation to the anticipation of adversities.

Citation

Marcazzan, E., Campagnolo, D. and Gianecchini, M. (2022), "Reaction or anticipation? Resilience in small- and medium-sized enterprises", Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, Vol. 29 No. 5, pp. 764-788. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSBED-07-2021-0271