The role of dynamic capabilities for resilience in pursuing business continuity: an empirical study

Abstract

The unprecedented systemic disruptions that occurred in the last years are highlighting a structural lack of resilience in most organisations. In this context, there is an increasing scholars’ interest in understanding to what extent capabilities to anticipate, respond and thrive in unprecedented situations represent a strategic lever for business continuity management in most sectors of activity. To contribute to this debate, this research adopts a dynamic capabilities perspective to investigate the specific capabilities that organisations build in the pursuit of business continuity. Based on multi-sectoral primary data collected in 2021 from HR professionals of 419 organisations operating in Italy, the outcomes of our quantitative study show that the business continuity requirements expressed by ISO22301 are perceived as interrelated and indivisible. Furthermore, our results suggest that the ambition to fulfil the business continuity requirements depends on the organisational capabilities to improvise and coordinate the use of its assets (i.e. people, technologies, premises, information) in the face of disruptions. Besides the managerial implications concerning how to build favourable organisational conditions to reduce the vulnerability to external risks, the research contributes to the literature by building new measurement scales to assess business continuity and disentangling the rationale behind the related dynamic capabilities framework.