Chapter 10: A Framework of Personal Resilience of SME Owners

Every organization must deal with new challenges such as automation, digitization, or structural transformation, which requires a highly resilient and engaged workforce to stay competitive. Strong leadership in a firm and specific abilities of the leader are necessary to manage uncertainties and to be able to react to certain changes. Various studies regarding organizations and resilience focus on large enterprises, while studies on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are lacking. SMEs account for 99.6% of all companies in Austria and are largely run by entrepreneurial owners and their families. Based on transformational theory, the theory of resilience as well as positive psychology, we investigate five SME owners and their personal resilience in an exploratory study. The owners were selected by purposive sampling with the aim to develop a framework with recommended actions for the personal resilience of SME leaders.