Abstract
As economic activity has become more global and interconnected, it has experienced a higher exposure to different types of risk (e.g., sanitary crises, wars, inflation). These disruptive events present significant challenges for companies, which has led to a growing interest in the study of business resilience. In most empirical studies, organizational resilience is operationalized through performance indicators, which results in a narrow and result-oriented understanding of the concept. Therefore, this project presents an inclusive conceptualization of organizational resilience under two perspectives: exante and ex-post; Resilience as an ex-ante process is a precursor to resilience outcomes (Sutcliffe & Vogus, 2003) that encompasses a set of resources, routines, and behaviors that are transformed and deployed to develop capabilities to reduce and overcome the impact of crises. Ex-post resilience refers to the capacity to survive a crisis (Marshall & Schrank, 2014). Performance levels may range from low to similar or even superior to pre-disruption performance (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2015). The resilience outcomes of a business are influenced by its characteristics and behavior before and during a crisis (Hillmann & Guenther, 2020). The project's objective is to present the ex-ante resilience conceptualized as a set of strategies and capabilities and examine how the family nature of the firm affects the degree of their development compared to non-family firms (papers 1 and 2). In addition, the third paper is dedicated to linking the ex-ante and ex-post resilience investigating whether there is a positive association between them, and also testing how this relationship changes among family and non-family firms. A cross-sectional survey was employed to collect data via online questionnaires, in alignment with the research objectives focused on higher-level managers. The context of the study of the first paper was the global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). The first survey was completed in 2020. The second and third studies are based on the second survey, which was completed in January 2024. The context of these studies is the recent disruptive events that have affected companies over the past five years, including the global pandemic caused by COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, and rising prices. This project contributes to the existing body of literature in several ways. Firstly, it adds to the growing corpus of literature on organizational resilience by providing a classification of the different conceptualizations of resilience. This will help to advance the limited understanding of the concept. In addition, the classification includes, on the one hand, the strategies and capabilities that must be developed and activated to face disruptive events. Conversely, we propose a link between these exante attributes (i.e., resilience strategies and capabilities) and ex-post resilience (i.e., organizational performance) to demonstrate which strategies and capabilities are more relevant to achieving desired outcomes. Secondly, the project contributes to the existing literature on family business resilience; While the majority of studies on the topic of resilience are primarily outcome-based, this project takes an a priori approach to compare resilience between family and non-family businesses by examining the degree to which resilience strategies and capabilities are applied. This provides an explanatory power, complementing the existing research on ex-post resilience, and helps explain the antecedents of positive family firm outcomes during crises.
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