New Strategies to Explain Organizational Resilience on the Firms: A Cross-Countries Configurations Approach

Jorge Heredia, Cathy Rubiños, William Vega, Walter Heredia and Alejandro Flores
Additional contact information
Jorge Heredia: School of Business, Universidad del Pacífico, Calle Sanchez Cerro 2141, Jesús María, Lima 15072, Peru
Cathy Rubiños: School of Business, Universidad del Pacífico, Calle Sanchez Cerro 2141, Jesús María, Lima 15072, Peru
William Vega: School of Business, Universidad del Pacífico, Calle Sanchez Cerro 2141, Jesús María, Lima 15072, Peru
Walter Heredia: Facultad de Economía y Negocios, Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago 7550000, Chile
Alejandro Flores: School of Business, Universidad del Pacífico, Calle Sanchez Cerro 2141, Jesús María, Lima 15072, Peru

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 3, 1-22

Abstract: Organizations need to develop their resilience to foster future success to survive complex environments. This research conducts a comparative analysis to understand firms’ strategies in a “black swan” event. We use the “strategy tripod” to operationalize resilience theory and explain the configurations or pathways that lead to high organizational resilience in a crisis context. The data correspond to 1936 firms drawn from the “Enterprise Survey 2020 for Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China (ESIEC)”, and to 66 Central American firms drawn from the “World Bank 2020 Enterprise Surveys” are also analyzed. The methodological approach fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is applied. We discuss and analyze the strategies of companies in this “new normal”; our results establish that in the case of emerging economies, organizational innovation seems to be a necessary condition for becoming an organizational resilience to a black swan crisis (finding from both cases). We also found that labor flexibility and emotional intelligence for the case of firms from China, and adequate control of the turbulence environment for the cases of Central America, were also necessary conditions for each region. We further argue that digitalization depends on access to government support for its success. China reinforces its strategies in an intensification of human resources flexibility. In addition, they are better prepared for the “black swan” crisis, allowing them to adapt quickly and generate business model innovation to mitigate the effects of the pandemic in this “new normal.” In contrast, Central America needs rapid organization for organizational resilience.

Keywords: organizational resilience; COVID-19; China; Central America; strategy tripod; fsQCA; resilience theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/3/1612/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/3/1612/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:3:p:1612-:d:738400

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().