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This chapter reflects on how global value chain resilience can be achieved in the aftermath of recent crises. Drawing on the view that globalization is not linear, and that contextualization is an important part of the international business discipline, the author argues that global value chain resilience needs to also be viewed from the perspective of emerging market supplier firms. Building resilience from international production restructure to create more flexibility may enhance multinational lead firms’ resilience in the aftermath of recent crises. But they may not be viable options for emerging market supplier firms that are location- and activity-bound. Building resilience from supplier firms’ perspective may have more to do with increasing operational efficiency in their value chain. Contextualizing resilience from the perspective of emerging market firms should contribute to ongoing discussions and debate on future global value chain resilience.

In the past decade, firms have become more aware of supply chain disruptions and their impact on the firm. Developing a supply chain resilience organizational culture has been proposed as an effective way to manage supply chain risks. This study intends to explore how the geographical location risks impact the decision to develop a supply chain resilience strategy, in particular, to anticipate the disruption proactively and have a business continuity plan in place. Using a unique database including thousands of manufacturing locations that belong to over 7,000 firms across 102 countries, we test three hypotheses to understand if geographical location risks, frequency of disruptive events, and the region in which a site is located are factors for the likelihood of a firm having a business continuity plan at their locations. The study also seeks to understand if there are regional effects and firm effects affecting the decision to develop resilience. With a particular focus in Latin America and the firms with a manufacturing presence in that region. The main findings of the study are that natural disaster risks do tend to develop a culture of resilience, while macroeconomic risks tend to do the opposite. These results remain stable for firms' effects. The Latin America region shows no observable statistical difference in developing resilience compared to the Asia region. While the Northern America region shows more resilience compared to Asia. We conclude that economic risk is less predictable and harder to develop a plan for than disruptions, such as natural disasters. The findings of this study present an opportunity for governments to develop resilience plans that can make their countries more attractive for investment to multinational firms looking to establish new manufacturing locations around the world.

Research on what makes family business resilient and why resilience matters in family businesses is in development. Drawing on the upper echelon theory, we examine the impact of female leadership on resilience development. Semi-structured interviews were performed in a selected family business. These were complemented by secondary data available from online publications. Results from the case study suggest that resilience consists of abilities to prepare for, control, adapt to, and absorb change. Evidence further indicates female-embodied attributes, female-enabled family cohesion, female-empowered governance, and female-characterized resource orchestration lead to the development of resilience.

This research paper aims to empirically analyse the impact of digital technologies and government support on the resilience of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) during the COVID-19 pandemic; in other words, how SMEs survive and manage the negative impact of the health situation with the support of digital technologies and government policy. A questionnaire survey was employed based on a sample of 96 SMEs and was divided into three parts, which comprised 28 questions. The SPSS software was used to analyse the results. The significant findings indicate that digital technologies positively affect SMEs' resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, combined with public support. This implies that digital technologies help SMEs be resilient and ensure their survival in a unique and challenging environment. This study has practical implications for different stakeholders to evaluate risks in health emergencies, filling a significant research gap in the literature. Furthermore, this research paper can provide empirical results on the potential impact of digital technologies used by SMEs and the availability of government support to survive during the COVID-19 crisis.

An important issue for medium-sized enterprises (MEs) in strategic management research is the ability to be resilient, recover and bounce back, after a disturbing and extenuating external event, such as the recent financial and economic crisis. Researchers have made efforts to understand the antecedents to resilience. Some studies propose capabilities and resources that strengthen experimentation while other researchers emphasize factors that support reliability. This study seeks to reconcile these views relying on upper echelons theory as the top management of MEs’ shape organizational attitudes and behaviors. The authors propose two antecedents in MEs related to management capabilities, ambidexterity and consistency, and the characteristics of family ownership that allow building of experimentation and reliability. We test our hypotheses on a dataset of 3,006 MEs and show how manager ambidexterity and family ownership play important roles in ME resilience.

Creating organisational resilience and creating a positive social impact is becoming a condition for sustainable business development. The adoption of digital technologies requires specific leadership characteristics to resolve complex societal challenges. The purpose of the research is to identify the critical strategic leadership characteristics for developing organisational resilience while creating social- and financial value. There is a research gap in strategic leadership, digital technologies, social impact, and organisational resilience studies which will be addressed in this research. The methodology embeds a critical literature review, complemented by bibliometric analysis. The adoption of digital technology is seen to be a key driver in the societal question and a tool to boost organisational resilience. Sensing, seizing, and driving digital adoption agenda as well as digital adoption are critical and require unique leadership characteristics where contextual ambidexterity was key to the strategic leader when building organisational resilience and creating social- and financial value. The research results can be used for identifying which characteristics strategic leaders must develop for digital technology adaptation to generate both a profit and positive social impact while boosting organisational resilience.

This chapter examines the key issues around organisational resilience – what it means for organisations, and the key elements they need to consider if they are looking to increase the ability of their operations to withstand challenges in their environment. Organisations have always had to adapt to changes in their environment, whether as a result of market-based, political, regulatory or technological developments. However, the pace of change and the number and frequency of external shocks, such as the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 epidemic, war and increasing nationalism, inflation, labour shortages, cyber-security threats and environmental crises have increased over recent years. Whilst some of these events could have been foreseen, in that they emerge relatively slowly, such as increasing nationalism, other crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic could not have been readily anticipated, both for the speed at which it occurred, but the significant impact it had on people and organisations. Clearly, many of these events can have severe consequences not only for society but also for organisations, potentially threatening their survival. Hence organisations are increasingly recognising the need to be both more aware of potential threats or even opportunities by constantly monitoring their environment, but also creating contingency or mitigation plans to become more resilient to such change and shocks. By becoming more aware of changes in their environment and incorporating risk evaluations and mitigation plans into strategy and regular business planning cycles, organisations can become more adaptive and agile to respond more quickly and robustly to such events. Whilst it is not possible to fully mitigate all risks to the organisation, increased resilience can reduce the severity or longevity of negative impacts or support the organisation to seek opportunities from change.

This chapter introduces the concept of overall organisational resilience, and then discusses some more functional areas of resilience: operational, financial, technological, reputational and institutional. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the effects of building greater organisational resilience and what organisations should consider when evaluating where to start on such a journey.