Schmalenbachs Zeitschrift fur betriebswirtschaftliche Forschung = Schmalenbach journal of business research最新文献

Following the massive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global economy and on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in particular, the concept of resilience has experienced a renaissance. As an organizational concept, business model resilience describes the extent to which an organization can maintain or quickly recover its value proposition despite unexpected current or future disruptions (Palzkill-Vorbeck 2018). Although research has been conducted in this area for decades, there is still a lack of a unified framework that brings together the findings from research and links them to organizational practice. The paper addresses this gap by developing a framework for business model resilience and demonstrating its practical relevance for organizational performance during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The framework includes 11 factors that characterize the resilience of an organization's business model. For managers and decision-makers, the framework is an opportunity to assess and improve the resilience of their organizations. For researchers, the framework is an important foundation for transferring the concept of business model resilience into organizational practice.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic triggered a global crisis affecting the work and partially the existence of businesses, governments, administrations and nonprofit organizations (NPOs). The latter not only faced severe challenges themselves, but also play(ed) a major role in fighting the pandemic, especially those offering services in social and health care. Maintaining service delivery under pandemic conditions to serve the often vital needs of clients requires (organizational) resilience. This concept generally relates to the ability to withstand adversity, to adapt in a turbulent environment and respond to (disruptive) change. Based on a qualitative content analysis of 33 interviews with nonprofit executives, this paper explores the impact of the pandemic on Austrian NPOs active in health and social care in terms of contextual challenges faced. Our study contributes to (nonprofit) resilience research and extreme context research literature as it illustrates how NPOs coped with this disruptive extreme context. Our findings show which resilience mechanisms (i.e. all kinds of resilient behavior, resources and capabilities) were helpful in overcoming pandemic challenges and getting through these hard times.

Health care systems need to be resilient to deal with disasters like the global spread of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) on top of serving the changing needs of a multi-morbid, ageing and often dispersed population. This paper identifies, discusses and augments critical dimensions of resilience retrieved from the academic literature. It pulls together an integrated concept of resilience characterised by organisational capabilities. Our concept does not focus on the micro-level like most resilience literature in health care but addresses the system level with many stakeholders involved. Distinguishing exogenous shocks to the health care system into adverse events and planned innovations provides the basis for our conclusions and insights. It becomes apparent only when dealing with planned interventions that transformative capabilities are indispensable to cope with sudden increases in health care pressures. Due to the current focus on absorptive and adaptive resilience, organisations over-rely on management capabilities that cannot generate a lasting increase in functionality. Therefore, reducing the resilience discussion to bouncing back from adverse events could deceive organisations into cultivating a suboptimal mix of organisational capabilities lacking transformative capabilities, which pave the way for a structural change that aims at a sustainably higher functionality.

Much research has been conducted on the effects of COVID-19 on company and supply chain resilience. However, few contributions have focused on small and medium-sized enterprises. These companies are claimed to be the drivers of economic growth but often lack access to resources and alternatives when interruptions occur, making them a bottleneck for supply chains. Using a multiple case study approach, this paper links resilience theory to the design of the relationships between eight German small and medium-sized enterprises and their suppliers and customers. It analyzes the way in which these companies combine contractual and relational investments across their supply chain flows of product, finance, and information in order to improve resilience. Company representatives were interviewed on three occasions between June 2018 and December 2020, that is, before COVID-19 and during the lockdowns. The results of the case study explain why and how companies of this type have been able to anticipate and manage the crisis. The interviews revealed that those companies that made the largest investments in the relational aspects of their partnerships while safeguarding product and financial flows through contracts performed best. In principle, contractual investments are higher in partnerships with suppliers. However, the precise combination of contractual and relational investments depends on the business model, the business philosophy of the CEO, and the allocation of power within the supply chain. These findings indicate that, when collaborating with small businesses, supply chain partners should focus on building relationships in order to create resilience in the supply chain.