Chapter 6: Strategic Responsiveness of Medium-sized Enterprises During an Economic and Financial Crisis: Antecedents of Resilience¹

An important issue for medium-sized enterprises (MEs) in strategic management research is the ability to be resilient, recover and bounce back, after a disturbing and extenuating external event, such as the recent financial and economic crisis. Researchers have made efforts to understand the antecedents to resilience. Some studies propose capabilities and resources that strengthen experimentation while other researchers emphasize factors that support reliability. This study seeks to reconcile these views relying on upper echelons theory as the top management of MEs’ shape organizational attitudes and behaviors. The authors propose two antecedents in MEs related to management capabilities, ambidexterity and consistency, and the characteristics of family ownership that allow building of experimentation and reliability. We test our hypotheses on a dataset of 3,006 MEs and show how manager ambidexterity and family ownership play important roles in ME resilience.