Beyond the COVID-19 pandemic: what builds organizational resilience capacity?

Abstract

Purpose

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has severely disrupted businesses around the world. To address the impact of operational and strategic business disruptions, this paper contributes to the practice of a firm's management in terms of identifying the determinants of organizational resilience (OR) and creating a hierarchical model of the potential sources of a firm's adaptive capability.

Design/methodology/approach

A novel research framework integrating Pareto analysis, grey theory and total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) has been applied to, first, identify the sources of a company's resilience and, second, to determine contextual relations among these sources of OR.

Findings

The findings of the survey highlight three primary sources that allow companies to build companies' resilience: access to financial resources, digitization level and supply chain (SC) collaboration. The authors' model shows that resilience cannot be viewed as a particular feature but rather as a dynamic intertwined network of different co-dependent sources.

Research limitations/implications

The proposed hierarchical model indicates that the most crucial sources of company's resilience in the recent pandemic are access to financial resources, digitization level and SC collaboration.

Originality/value

The study takes an original investigation on cognitive grounds, touching on the problem of firms' resilience to the unique nature of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The study also represents one of the few attempts to use integrated Pareto analysis, grey theory and TISM to examine this critical area of firm management.

Citation

Matysek-Jędrych, A., Mroczek-Dąbrowska, K. and Kania, A. (2022), "Beyond the COVID-19 pandemic: what builds organizational resilience capacity?", International Journal of Emerging Markets, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJOEM-06-2022-0948