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The paper aims to develop a strategic conceptualization and measurement scale of organizational resilience to support researchers examining how small firms prepare and respond deliberately to general disruptions in the operating environment over more extended time frames.

The paper uses a four-step process to develop, present and test (for predictive validity) a scale of strategic organizational resilience for frequent events or those needing long-term responses.

The resulting seven-factor measurement scale of organizational resilience consists of readiness, slack, problem-solving, flexibility, connectedness, adaptiveness and proactiveness.

The literature on organizational resilience explains how organizations recover from rare but catastrophic events by focusing on adaptation principles and short-term survival. The broader conceptualization presented here enables the study of organizational resilience in small-medium size enterprises (SMEs) across more frequent and pervasive events, such as financial crises, industry downturns and other forms of structural change and technological disruption. This is operationalized in a measure that includes new strategic factors associated with forward-planning and more traditional operationally focused elements.