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Organisational resilience and digital maturity both explain how some organisations are better able to cope with unexpected disruptions. However, research exploring the relationship between these two concepts, and their role in addressing exogenous shocks, remains sparse. This study first aimed to compare digitally mature SME retailers’ organisational resilience with that of digitally less mature SME retailers and then investigate further how their digital maturity impacted their response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The authors adopt an explanatory two-phase mixed-method research design, with online surveys from 79 SME retailers in South Africa, followed by interviews.

Digitally mature SMEs exhibited higher levels of organisational resilience, specifically with respect to situational awareness, management of keystone vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity. The authors also demonstrate that digital leadership is a greater driver of organisational resilience than digital capabilities.

The authors suggest ways for SME retailers to develop their digital maturity, particularly their digital leadership, to increase their organisational resilience.

This paper makes a case for SME retailers to focus on building their digital maturity to better cope with and learn from unexpected events. In particular, digital maturity is positively associated with SME retailers’ innovation and creativity and their devolved and responsive decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how entrepreneurial behaviors support small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) resilience, refine the concept of entrepreneurial resilience, and identify how SME resilience might be promoted.

Qualitative data were collected in the UK via 11 focus groups which provided a sub-sample of 19 SME participants.

Because of their experience operating in uncertain environments, their direct experience of adversity, and the informal organizational settings they inhabit, entrepreneurs are often highly resilient and possess capabilities that enable SMEs to be resilient. Entrepreneurial resilience provides a basis for SME resilience that differs significantly from best practices as understood in larger firms.

Exploratory qualitative research on a small sample (n=19) limits the generalizability of this work. Further research could quantitatively test the paper’s findings and/or examine the link between entrepreneurial resilience and the resilience of larger firms.

Rather than encouraging formal planning and redundancy, policy and practice designed to promote the resilience of SMEs should pay greater attention to building capacities to cope with uncertainty, generating and leveraging personal relationships, and activating the ability to experiment and think creatively in response to crises.

This paper draws on organizational psychology research to refine understanding of entrepreneurial resilience and to empirically examine and inductively theorize the multi-level relationships between entrepreneurial resilience and SME resilience.

The purpose of this paper is to distinguish different types of sustainable digital entrepreneurs (SDEs) and explore their approaches toward enhancing organizational resilience.

Investigation of entrepreneur characteristics using Grounded Theory methodology; 12 semi-structured telephone interviews with (owner-)managers of digital-resilient small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups in Germany; adaptation of a sustainability-digitalization-matrix for initial clustering; investigation of reoccurring patterns (within and between clusters) through variable-oriented content analysis; application of the capability-based conceptualization of organizational resilience for synthesis and extension.

First, the authors present a new typology of SDEs, including descriptions of the four main types (Process-Oriented System Thinker, Unconventional Strategist, Dynamic Visionary and Success-Oriented Opportunist). Second, the authors propose a conceptual framework with six success factors of organizational resilience. The framework accentuates the influence of SDEs on organizational culture and the macro-environment.

Digital sustainability and resilience are emerging management principles. The insights gained will allow (future) entrepreneurs to perform a self-assessment and replicate approaches toward enhancing SME resilience; for example, governing the co-creation of an organizational culture with a strong integrative view on sustainability and digitalization.

SMEs are characterized by high vulnerability and a reactive response to the disruptions caused by sustainability crises and digitalization. Blending sustainable and digital entrepreneurship at a micro-level, the authors identified the success factors underpinning organizational resilience that are associated with the characteristics of four types of SDEs.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of a collaborative organisational development and learning (OD/L) programme for small and medium-sized enterprise’s (SME’s) and micro businesses (MB) to contribute towards business resilience and sustainability.

This is an ethnographic case study that utilised an iterative interpretative approach to data collection and analysis, which was conducted around key OD/L interventions.

The findings demonstrate that the provision of an OD/L programme that focused on collaboration and learning, had both an immediate positive effect on business owners and long term effect in relation to business confidence, clarity, and action.

The limitations of this study relate to the fact that the sample population is small so that the findings are not generalisable, and some of the challenges faced by SME business owners may be confined to socially deprived rural locations. Future research could focus on replicating the designed OD/L programme, or aspects of it, and a longitudinal study could be conducted over time.

The practical implications of this study are that it gives direction for those designing support for SME/MB’s to include tried and proven OD/L interventions.

The social implications include that by demonstrating targeted support to SME business owners in socially deprived areas, the potential for growth in terms of survival and flourishing are increased and economic regeneration is positively influenced.

There are few studies in this area, the OD/L programme highlights that collaboration, and sustainable actions to develop resilience, have a part to play in supporting the SME/MB population, and a contribution to make towards a more buoyant economy.

Organisational resilience is a strategic resource within the contingencies of organising in Small and Micro businesses (SMEs). In this regard, the notion of resilient human capital in propelling a resilient organisation has come to dominate the contemporary discourse on the performance of SMEs. Drawing on human capital theory as a meta-theoretical lens, we examine the cumulative effect of managerial training on managers’ performance in the context of relatively underdeveloped institutions and markets. Employing a quantitative research methodology, data for our empirical inquiry comes from a survey of 506 Ghanaian SMEs operating in diverse sectors of the economy. Following SMEs being at the convergence point of resource constraint, we show why some firm managers are more likely to exhibit managerial resilience than those in other firms. Our data evidence suggests that targeted managerial training, in practice, has the potential to strengthen organisational resilience. Nevertheless, the content, efficiency and frequency of the training received, we argue, accounts for the differential performance of managers within the contingencies of everyday organising. We conclude by delineating some relevant implications of our study for the theory and practice of managerial resilience nurturing in organising.

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), which form a significant portion in many economies, are some of the most vulnerable to the impact of extreme weather events (EWEs). This is of particular importance to the construction industry, as an overarching majority of construction companies are SMEs who account for the majority of employment and income generation within the industry. In the UK, previous research has identified construction SMEs as some of the worst affected by EWEs. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Given the recent occurrences of EWEs and predictions suggesting increases in both the intensity and frequency of EWEs in the future, improving the resilience of construction SMEs is vital for achieving a resilient construction industry. A conceptual framework is first developed which is then populated and expanded based on empirical evidence. Positioned within a pragmatic research philosophy, case study research strategy was adopted as the overall research strategy in undertaking this investigation.

Based on the findings of two in-depth case studies of construction SMEs, a framework was developed to represent EWE resilience of construction SMEs, where resilience was seen as a collective effect of vulnerability, coping strategies, and coping capacities of SMEs, characteristics of the EWE and the wider economic climate.

The paper provides an original contribution towards the overarching agenda of the resilience of SMEs, and policy making in the area of EWE risk management by presenting a novel conceptual framework depicting the resilience of medium sized construction companies.

Resilient firms are more likely to survive crisis. This paper aims to investigate the resilient behavior displayed by small and medium enterprise (SME) owners in the pandemic context and the sequence of antecedents leading to resilient behavior.

Seven SME owners, from different business sectors, were interviewed twice in 8 months, to assess their actions and underlying entrepreneurial resilience. A model was developed depicting the sequence of activities leading to entrepreneurial resiliency behavior. The study was conducted in the capital city of Odisha, an eastern Indian state.

The results indicate that entrepreneurial resiliency is manifested in various forms where the SME owners engage in bricolage. Resiliency has an inevitable time dimension, where SME owners estimate the period for which adversity is likely to persist. They focus on alternative action to demonstrate resiliency. It was also learnt that revenue management during a crisis requires entrepreneurial marketing with innovativeness, opportunity seeking and value creation to improve resiliency.

This research is important for policymakers who can strengthen resiliency through the support and provision of adequate information to SME owners. Educators can use the model for discussion and pedagogy. Finally, SME owners can evaluate their response behaviors to a crisis and draw insights.

The approach of the study was longitudinal and qualitative. This study contributes to the literature gap on resiliency in the context of emerging markets and SMEs.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has had a tremendous negative effect on the economies around the world by infusing uncertainty into supply chains. In this paper, the authors address two important research questions (RQs): (1) did COVID-19 wage subsidies impact small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to become more flexible towards the SMEs' business customers and (2) can such flexibility be a source for greater resilience to the crisis? As a result, the authors investigate the relationship between governmental wage subsidies and SMEs' flexibility norms towards the SMEs' business customers (study 1). The authors further uncover when and how flexibility towards existing customers contributes to SME resilience (study 2).

The authors frame the inquiry under the resource dependence theory (RDT) and behavioural additionality principle. The authors use survey methodology and test the assumptions in study 1 (n = 225) and study 2 (n = 95) on a sample of SMEs from various business-to-business (B2B) industries in Croatia.

Overall, in study 1, the authors find that SMEs that receive governmental wage subsidies have greater flexibility norms. However, this relationship is significantly conditioned by SMEs' competitive profile. SMEs that strongly rely on innovation are more willing to behave flexibly when receiving subsidies, whereas SMEs driven by branding do not. Study 2 sheds light on when flexibility towards existing customers increases SME resilience. Findings show that flexibility norms are negatively related to resilience, but this relationship is becoming less negative amongst SMEs with lower financial dependence on the largest customer.

This study extends RDT in the area of firm–government relationships by showing that wage subsidies became a source of power for the Government and a source of dependency for SMEs. In such cases, the SMEs receiving those subsidies align with the governmental agenda and exhibit higher flexibility towards the SMEs' customers. Drawing arguments from behavioural additionality, the authors show that this effect varies due to SMEs' attention and organisational priorities resulting from different competitive profiles. Ultimately, the authors showcase that higher flexibility norms can contribute to resilience if the SME restructures its dependency by having a less-concentrated customer base.

This research paper highlights the economic impact on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) due to Coronavirus outbreaks. It proposes factors that influence the strengthening and survival of SMEs.

In this research, resilience is reflected in the following aspects hope, problem resolution and persistence. This quantitative study analyses a purposive sample of 120 small and medium-sized firms in India. The study's primary data are the responses to questionnaires issued to respondents, analyzed and hypotheses formed and tested using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique.

The study results show that all the variables significantly reduce the impact of COVID-19 on SMEs. The presented model is expected to help researchers, business modelers, analysts and real professionals with further studies in the SME context.

This new approach adds to the business resilience knowledge of SMEs and has practical implications for manufacturing organizations seeking to become robust during and after COVID-19.

The purpose of this paper, according to the evolutionary perspective of resilience, is to provide a revised adaptive cycle model that explains how organisations that are embedded in a local system can foster their resilience.

An exploratory case study analysis was carried out. The study adopted the methods and principles proposed by Eisenhardt (1989). Case studies were selected according the match-pair method and consist of two Italian wineries operating into the same wine cluster. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analysed through descriptive statistics and qualitative data analysis techniques.

The study proposes a revised model for the resilience strategies of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which combines firm and cluster level. Findings show that the resilience of SMEs is primarily driven by internal resilience strategies, and their surviving and adapting capacity, from a certain point of the evolutionary cycle, is fostered by internal decisions rather than by the influence of the external environment.

The study has some limitations. In particular, the exploratory survey does not permit the generalisation of results, and further empirical evidence is required. This research represents an initial step toward the development of a more exhaustive understanding of how the relationship SMEs-cluster can positively or negatively affect the resilience of organisations.

The proposed model for the resilience strategies of SMEs offers also insights for managers and entrepreneurs.

This study significantly contributes to theory on resilience in the management field, that is largely related to economic geography, while investigations about the resilience at the firm level are limited and inconclusive.