Effective Crisis Management during Adversity: Organizing Resilience Capabilities of Firms and Sustainable Performance during COVID-19

Abstract

Drawing on crisis management and organizational resilience literature, this study adopts a firm’s capability-based perspective of organizational resilience to examine how different sets of firm-based resilient capabilities a firm has developed can help a firm achieve sustainable firm performance during a crisis. We took a configurational approach and applied the fsQCA method to examine how various combinations of a firm’s financial, cognitive, and behavioral capabilities as causal conditions can affect firm financial performance. For the empirical analysis, 21 listed Chinese film and television firms were selected. We collected information on financial capability from 2018 to 2020, and on cognitive and behavioral capabilities and firm size in 2020. This study obtains six configurations or paths that lead to the improved performance. Overall, the findings indicate that if a large firm has a low level of financial capability, it needs to leverage its cognitive capability instead of behavioral capability. A small firm with high financial capability needs to quickly leverage its cognitive capability but can use less behavioral capability. On the other hand, small firms with low financial capability need to utilize its behavioral capability to take quicker actions. With comprehensive analysis and multiple-perspective comparison of configurations, the study proposes various response strategic suggestions for firms with different sizes during the COVID-19 epidemic in China.

The role of organizational resilience in SME service innovation and value cocreation

“…Additionally, understanding the environment in which consumers are located provides insight into how cocreation practices manifest themselves (Wang et al, 2019). Therefore, the complex interplay of cultural, national and managerial factors, together with the specific contexts in which these SMEs operate in different countries, could lead to remarkable variations across nations (Hu et al, 2022;Kahn et al, 2018;Witmer, 2019). These factors significantly influence how organizational resilience affects service innovation and value realization in diverse national contexts.…”

Growth of Venture Firms under State Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Fuzzy Set

“…Equifinality, which means "the premise that multiple combinations of antecedent conditions are equally effective" (Pappas and Woodside 2021, p. 4), is the basic principle of fsQCA. Depending on this principle, fsQCA enables researchers to explore how the absence or presence of their factors and configurations result in the same outcome (Hu et al 2022).…”

“…In addition, fsQCA is an ideal empirical approach to deal with data sets when the sample size is small or intermediate (Sellnow and Seeger 2021). Hu et al (2022) applied fsQCA and analyzed 21 Chinese firms to show how the diverse configurations of firms' resilience capabilities result in sustainable performance of firms during periods of adversity in China. Compared with conventional quantitative methods, fsQCA has several disadvantages, such as reflection of the researchers' previous knowledge by using calibration measures (Vis 2012) and the impossibility of showing the influence of an individual causal condition on the dependent variable (Skarmeas et al 2014).…”

“…Organizational resilience refers to "the incremental capacity of an organization to anticipate and adjust to the environment" (Ortiz-de-Mandojana and Bansal 2016, p. 6). It is particularly important for firms to recover from crises and achieve better performance and growth (Hu et al 2022). Organizational resilience was measured by a four-item scale developed by Zhang and Qi (2021) ("We can cope with changes in our business brought on by COVID-19", "We can easily adapt our business operations to the disruption caused by COVID-19", "We can provide a quick response to the negative effects of a COVID-19 disruption on our business", and "We always remain aware of changes in customer demand.").…”

“…However, how the combinations of legitimacy building strategies affect Chinese venture growth and what the dimensions of such strategies have been minimally studied. Under such an economic system, the question of how Chinese ventures can manage crisis and achieve venture growth when disruptive and unexpected events significantly reduce available resources that ventures can acquire from external stakeholders (Brown and Rocha 2020) has to be further investigated (Hu et al 2022).…”