The Impact of SMEs’ Decision-Making Processes on Their Resilience to Crises: A Literature Review and Future Research Directions

Impact des processus de décision adoptés par les PME sur leur résilience face aux crises: Revue de littérature et perspectives de recherche

Mohamed Hamza Idam and Mohamed-Larbi Aribou ()
Additional contact information
Mohamed Hamza Idam: UAE - Abdelmalek Essaadi University [Tétouan] = Université Abdelmalek Essaadi [Tétouan]
Mohamed-Larbi Aribou: UAE - Abdelmalek Essaadi University [Tétouan] = Université Abdelmalek Essaadi [Tétouan]

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are particularly exposed to crises because of their limited resources and strong dependence on managerial decision-making. Although organizational resilience has received growing scholarly attention, the specific relationship between SME decision-making processes and resilience in crisis contexts remains insufficiently understood. This article therefore addresses the following question: how do the decision-making processes adopted by SMEs during crises contribute to their resilience? The study draws on a literature review based on Scopus and ScienceDirect, covering publications available up to 2024, and supplemented by snowball sampling. A final corpus of 29 articles was analyzed. The findings indicate that SME resilience is shaped by the interaction between organizational characteristics, decision-makers' profiles, and the decision-making approaches adopted during crises. They also reveal that the literature remains fragmented regarding the mechanisms through which decision-making contributes to resilience. By specifically connecting these two streams of research, this review extends broader work on organizational resilience and highlights the need for further investigation of causal and effectual decision-making logics under crisis conditions.

Keywords: Crisis; Literature review; Resilience; SME; Decision-making processes; Revue de littérature; Crise; Résilience; PME; Processus de décision (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sbm
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05742316v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in International Journal of Accounting, Finance, Auditing, Management and Economics, 2026, 7 (10), pp.613-632. ⟨10.5281/zenodo.22102497⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-05742316v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05742316

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22102497

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().