Navigating long-term orientation, adaptability and crisis response: a strategic view on family business resilience Open Access

With increasing economic turmoil and global instability, including because of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent academic discourse has directed its scholarly attention to the concept of resilience (Hillmann and Guenther, 2021; Korber and McNaughton, 2018; Kromidha and Bachtiar, 2024; Linnenluecke, 2017; Verreynne et al., 2018). The term “resilience” broadly refers to the way organizations react and adapt to changes to survive (Sutcliffe and Vogus, 2003).

As a vital part of the global economy and the prevalent business form (e.g. Botero et al., 2015; La Porta et al., 1999; Tsoutsoura, 2021), family businesses provide a specific context in terms of resilience (Chrisman et al., 2011). Research suggests that characteristics such as employment continuity (van Essen et al., 2015), long-term orientation (LTO) (Lumpkin and Brigham, 2011), the wish to preserve socioemotional wealth (SEW) (Firfiray and Gomez-Mejia, 2021; Gomez-Mejia et al., 2011) and the importance of nonfinancial goals (Campopiano et al., 2019) are significant components of family business resilience.

Several literature reviews explore family business resilience, highlighting different definitions and dimensions (see Table 1). The article by Prasad and Roy (2024) reviews family business resilience (FBR), identifying key factors like survivability capital, social capital, long-term orientation and governance. The factors are categorized into antecedents, mechanisms and outcomes while delineating the impact of a family, business and external support dimension. Highlighting gaps in existing research, it calls for deeper exploration of cultural and regulatory influences, stakeholder relationships and emerging resilience strategies.

The review by Yilmaz et al. (2024) explores various dimensions of resilience in family businesses, providing a structured definition that integrates key resilience factors in ensuring long-term sustainability. It builds on foundational knowledge by conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) that methodically synthesizes research, offering a deeper analysis of specific FBR factors, identifying gaps in existing literature and highlighting research attention on the concept. The study of Buchner et al. (2021) emphasize survival, adaptability and financial structures as critical resilience factors. Beech et al. (2020) examine familiness and nonfinancial goals, showing how familiness mediates business relationships. Ventura et al. (2020) take a temporal perspective on resilience, vulnerability and operational continuity.

While these reviews provide significant insights into the determinants of business resilience, they primarily focus on conceptual frameworks and structural factors, emphasizing what resilience is rather than how family businesses achieve it. As Conz et al. (2023) states, “these theories overlook how people act in organizational contexts, and especially how resilience as a strategy in practice manifests through the daily actions of owners/managers” (Conz et al., 2023, p. 958). From a general perspective, the organizational resilience literature lacks understanding on how businesses apply organizational practices to develop resilience (Joussen et al., 2025; Shepherd and Williams, 2023). Yilmaz et al. (2024) emphasize this shortcoming in their future research agenda on family business resilience, stating that further inquiry is needed into “which explicit methods family businesses leverage to cultivate their capacity for strategic renewal, consequently enhancing resilience” (Yilmaz et al., 2024, p. 77). This suggests that despite growing attention on family business resilience, research has paid little attention to the role of specific managerial initiatives on family business resilience, overlooking the role of deliberate, proactive strategies in shaping resilience. Given their context, family firms face distinctive challenges, including succession complexities, resource constraints and the balancing of financial and nonfinancial goals (Prasad and Roy, 2024). Without a clear understanding on strategic mechanisms influencing resilience in family businesses, both researchers and practitioners lack actionable insights to guide decision-making.

Therefore, the review makes three primary contributions to the existing literature on family business resilience. First, it shifts the focus from conceptual frameworks and structural determinants to strategies employed by family firms, addressing a critical gap identified by scholars such as Conz et al. (2023) and Yilmaz et al. (2024). Second, by adopting a strategic perspective and differentiating between family and business systems, this research illuminates the dynamic, strategic interplay through which resilience is built, capturing the nuanced influence of identity, culture and values. Finally, unlike previous reviews that primarily emphasize static components, this study prioritizes actionable insights, offering a structured framework for decision-making that provides both scholars and practitioners with practical guidance for enhancing resilience in family business contexts.

Methodologically, the study follows a two-fold approach. First, the authors conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) (Tranfield et al., 2003), evaluating and synthesizing the existing research on the subject. Second, using the results of the literature review, an inductive thematic analysis following Gioia et al. (2012) integrates strategic approaches and conceptualize the findings.

Family ownership and control are two common characteristics of family businesses. Depending on the definition, the percentage of family ownership varies from at least 5% of a business’s equity (Villalonga and Amit, 2006) to at least 50% (Amore and Minichilli, 2018; Miller et al., 2013). Further definitions include self-understanding or next-generation transfer as a family business (Litz, 1995), including a broader group of family members and the motive of succession or business transfer to the next generation (Chua et al., 1999; Heck and Trent, 1999). The variety of definitions reflects the heterogeneity of family businesses, which may, to some extent, affect the comparability of family businesses and their strategies (Jaskiewicz and Dyer, 2017).

Meyer (1982) asserts that an organization’s strategy plays a crucial role in shaping its resilience. Strategies such as reinvestment, innovation and change management can develop strategic resilience, enabling firms to dynamically renew capabilities in response to external disruptions (Hamel and Välikangas, 2003). From a resource-based view (RBV), such strategies are underpinned by resource-oriented management initiatives, which serve as an internal toolbox for managers to effectively allocate, reconfigure and leverage resources to develop capabilities for organizational resilience (Barney, 1991). In particular, innovation-led strategies and innovation-led human resource (HR) practices strengthen an organization’s adaptive capabilities towards resilience (Do et al., 2022). Extending the RBV to a dynamic capability-based (DC) perspective, resilience strategies involve leveraging routine capabilities for stability, ad hoc capabilities for immediate recovery and dynamic capabilities for long-term adaptation and growth (Fares et al., 2022).

These perspectives on organizational resilience do not strongly emphasize context-dependent characteristics, yet research suggests that factors such as firm size (e.g. Verreynne et al., 2023) or ownership structure (e.g. Zhang et al., 2024) influence an organization’s ability to develop and leverage capabilities for resilience. Emphasizing the distinctive context of family businesses in the socioemotional wealth perspective (SEW), family businesses prioritize nonfinancial goals, such as credibility, transgenerational continuity and emotional attachment to the business, over purely monetary gains (Berrone et al., 2012; Gomez-Mejia et al., 2011). The pursuit of SEW is a key driver of family firms to withstand external shocks and navigate challenges (Eckey and Memmel, 2023).

Several recent studies highlight strategies based on characteristics inherent to family businesses (e.g. Amaral and Da Rocha, 2023; Conz et al., 2023; Fang et al., 2021). Empirical evidence indicates that several family businesses’ distinct unique characteristics shape their strategic approaches and may be advantageous compared to other organizational structures (e.g. Amann and Jaussaud, 2012; Eckey and Memmel, 2023; Miller et al., 2007) or under particular circumstances (e.g. Amato et al., 2020; Amore and Minichilli, 2018; van Essen et al., 2015). The alignment of strategic actions with the family business’s vision is crucial to generate resilience (Memili et al., 2023). Similarly, adaptability and adaptive capacity for strategic renewal are widely regarded as critical to achieving resilience in family businesses (Soluk et al., 2021). The interplay of open and closed innovation strategies and the deployment of slack resources under the influence of family-centered noneconomic goals are further fundamental measures in the face of environmental adversity (Campopiano et al., 2019). The balancing of proactiveness, innovativeness, and risk avoidance (Czakon et al., 2023) or strategic means of reacting and proacting (Smith et al., 2023) shapes strategic responses to adversity. Further, practicing resilience encompasses actions based on resilience understandings by managers (Conz et al., 2020). To conclude, it is essential to recognize that the application and effectiveness of resilience strategies are highly context-dependent for family businesses (Jaskiewicz and Dyer, 2017).

• Step 1: Systematic literature review (Tranfield et al., 2003)

The authors followed recent guidelines on literature reviews by Snyder (2019) and Kraus et al. (2022), enabling an accurate assessment of prior research and increasing the prospect of capturing relevant literature (Kraus et al., 2024). To curate a significant corpus of potentially relevant literature, the authors searched in Web of Science (WoS) and EBSCO (Business Source Complete). The authors chose the WoS database as it is recommended for its accuracy (Gusenbauer, 2024), widely used in literature reviews in high-quality journals in the field of resilience (e.g. Joussen et al., 2025; Zahoor et al., 2024), and in international rankings like the Academic Ranking of World Universities and the Times Higher Education World University Ranking (Maseda et al., 2022).

The authors have chosen the search terms “resilien*” or “cris*” or “renew*” and “family firm*” or “family business*” in all fields, including title, abstract and keywords, based on a prior screening of relevant literature related to the objective of the study to identify suitable search terms. The authors limited the sample to English-language studies published in peer-reviewed journals, which resulted in 1,054 articles covering the year 2023. In accordance with Tranfield et al. (2003), quality thresholds for publications in academic journals were applied, resulting in 808 articles, including duplicates. The comparability or conversion between these leading academic journal rankings follows the suggestion of Kraus et al. (2020a) based on the Academic Journal Guide/ABS Chartered Association of Business Schools (UK) ranking, with a cutoff of ≥2 or the JCR impact factors (IF) by Clarivate Analytics, with a cutoff of ≥1.5.

In the second-level screening, the authors examined abstracts to ensure alignment with the research objectives. This step was necessary to exclude studies that used “resilient” merely as a descriptive attribute or medical, psychological, geographic or historical aspects, rather than resilience as a concept. Furthermore, duplicates were removed, grey literature, non-peer-reviewed publications and conference proceedings were excluded.

To shortlist articles in a third step ensuring strong academic rigor, the authors read the abstracts and full manuscripts of the remaining 245 articles and added 11 relevant articles based on cross-referencing manual tracing of subsequent citations to further reduce the possibility of missing pertinent research. This multiple-step full-text screening identified a shortlist of 57 articles, which examine resilience-building in family businesses. This multiple-step selection process is shown in Figure 1.

• Step 2: Thematic inductive analysis

The authors then employed a thematic inductive analysis of the sample and findings of the SLR following Gioia et al. (2012) for developing grounded theory from qualitative research. This pattern-inducing technique enables the development of new concepts by identifying reoccurring themes, grouping and synthesizing related research arguments and findings into new concept development, thus going beyond a descriptive analysis of the previous SLR.

Using an iterative coding approach following Corbin and Strauss (1990), the authors applied (1) open coding, (2) axial coding and (3) theoretical coding. During the open coding, the authors identified key activities, approaches and strategies contributing to family business resilience across different conceptualizations to be extracted to first-order concepts. These were examined for commonalities and interrelations, leading to second-order themes that were further abstracted into aggregate dimensions, synthesizing them into an overarching conceptual framework of family business resilience strategies. Although presented linearly, the process was dynamic and iterative, continuously refining categories and comparing data and theory against existing literature. Upon reaching an agreement, qualitative rigor was ensured through inter-coder reliability checks. Seven major dimensions feature the main topics of family business resilience in current research; these consist of 29 second-order themes that comprise 89 first-order themes. The final synthesis captured the interplay between resilience strategies, offering a structured yet emergent perspective on family business resilience.

This is the first SLR in the field of family business resilience to apply a data-driven thematic analysis following Gioia et al. (2012) to distinguish the strategies that lead to organizational resilience in family businesses, allowing for novel insights on the concept. Figure 2 summarizes the process linearly, including all themes and their aggregate dimensions, concealing the dynamic and iterative nature of the analytical process.

Based on the review, the study integrates identified strategies into an innovative conceptualization of family business resilience strategies, depicted in Figure 3. Resilient crisis response involves immediate, crisis-specific actions. General resilience practices (outer circle in Figure 3) work in tandem with family business–specific mechanisms (inner circle in Figure 3), such as strong emphasis on values and the involvement of owner-managers. These strategies operate continuously, with the interconnectivity of activities impacting resilience beyond the crisis-response period.

Crisis-specific operations are essential for responding to changes in markets and customer needs. A problem-solving orientation enables effective solutions to continue value delivery to customers and meet customer expectations despite crisis-specific impediments (Le Breton-Miller and Miller, 2022). In the short term, adopting less complex business models or simplifying business operations can sustain core transactions (Cucculelli and Peruzzi, 2020).

Targeted redeployment and resource mobilization are crucial for effective crisis management, with ownership involvement, adept leadership engagement and managerial competency activating key survivability resources (Issah et al., 2023). Resource complementarity in terms of skill sets, internal or external resources or among family members further enhances the overall resource base (Engeset, 2020). Strategic advantage unfolds especially during crises, where swift and effective mobilization effectively fills resource gaps (Hammouda and Basly, 2020).

Flexible and fast managerial adaptability is a key characteristic of a crisis response to shifting demands and disruptions, enabling greater creativity and agility regarding products and customer structure (Amaral and Da Rocha, 2023). The more flexibly a family business can adapt its governance to take crisis-specific action, the more it builds strategic capacity for future organizational resilience (Škare and Porada-Rochoń, 2021).

The involvement of multiple (Arrondo-García et al., 2016) and founding generations (Kraus et al., 2020b) shapes perceived duty and moral obligation towards the business, correlating with a lower risk of business failure and a positive impact on financial performance (Miroshnychenko et al., 2023; Revilla et al., 2016; Żukowska et al., 2021). An explanation points to owner-managers as stewards or custodians of their business (Block and Ulrich, 2023). Their understanding of the family’s role and their relationships view the family firm as a “heirloom,” instilling a sense of responsibility for the family business and its employees, translating into a lower tendency for downsizing and wage cuts and higher employee retainment during crises (Bressan et al., 2023; van Essen et al., 2015).

A long-term orientation encourages strategic approaches to building a resilient business that withstands economic fluctuations, industry changes and unforeseen challenges in a longer timeframe (Mzid et al., 2019). The long-term perspective aligns with a dynastic or transgenerational vision of the family business, emphasizing successful continuity. Proactive, open, constructive and reliable communication works as a support mechanism (Boyd et al., 2023), fostering business operations continuity and a solution-focused approach to challenges, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic (Mihotić et al., 2023).

The resilience of a family business is intricately tied to entrepreneurial motivation, particularly regarding succession of the next generation (Anggadwita et al., 2023). Motivation is considered a driver for the outperformance of female-led family businesses in terms of nonfinancial performance, referring to long-term and sustainable growth indicators (Chadwick and Dawson, 2018). Similar findings can be found regarding the link of resilience and entrepreneurial well-being for women entrepreneurs that are often challenged by work–family responsibilities (Essuman et al., 2024). Centering the organization`s goal on family values serves organizational resilience beyond profit maximization (Smith et al., 2023). Shared values, such as integrity, entrenching managers’ and employees’ motivation, facilitating decision-making based on a shared system of meaning. A communication strategy is crucial for translating shared family values into organizational resilience (Hammouda and Basly, 2020). The individual resilience capacity of owner–managers and their personal willingness to tackle difficulties translate a personal mindset into an organizational resilience mindset (Santoro et al., 2021). As an attitude of “mental readiness”, a resilience mindset supports business continuity (Haynes et al., 2019). Narratives or “survivor stories” (Czakon et al., 2023) about the survival and longevity of the family business are key factors in building a collective resilience mindset (Boyd et al., 2023). Passed down through generations, they help ground a business’s identity and culture, often reflecting values such as social commitment or modesty.

Relational capital through external networks, particularly with regard to suppliers, offers family businesses increased flexibility and cooperation and alleviates the risk of supply chain vulnerability during crises (Hanson et al., 2019). The robustness of the community and the importance of network connections were put into sharp focus by the COVID-19 pandemic (Tolba et al., 2021). Family-internal social ties constitute a vital source of relational and social capital, crucial for the functioning, persistence and resilience of family businesses (Cater and Schwab, 2008; Salvato et al., 2020). Conversely, destructive family relationships, lack of trust and opportunistic tendencies are considered detrimental to family businesses (Soluk, 2022). Different perceptions of “family” or an interference of family roles may bring additional risks (Yang and Danes, 2015). Strong bonds in family businesses are a competitive advantage visible in “family-to-business-support” and can indirectly impact entrepreneurial outcomes (Powell and Eddleston, 2017). Family-to-business support is not limited to direct family members but may extend to “allies” like trusted employees or external stakeholders (Bressan et al., 2023).

Positive relations with employees characterized by strong solidarity and appreciation contribute to employee trust and willingness to follow owner–managers’ guidance (Hammouda and Basly, 2020). Strong employee-employer relationships enable and accelerate the resumption and continuation of business after a crisis (Schwaiger et al., 2022). Reciprocally, a relation-focused approach of employees with the family business promotes employment continuity and a sense of collectiveness and collectivism that fosters workplace harmony (Hadjielias et al., 2022). These strong relations between employees and family businesses are also referred to as “pseudo family cohesion” (Soluk et al., 2021) and enhance organizations’ resilience by facilitating effective cooperation with trusted employees (Azouz et al., 2022).

Continuous building and use of external business networks and alliances enable family businesses to seize new entrepreneurial opportunities (Bürgel et al., 2023). To fully leverage these opportunities, family businesses engage in “learning from experience” as a long-term-oriented strategy. Reflecting and exchanging on these experiences across networks enriches their strategic understanding, helping them assess their positioning and potential for further ventures (Pal et al., 2014).

Digitalization is crucial to remain competitive, while digital readiness is considered a required antecedent for (digital) business innovation (Xie et al., 2023). During the COVID-19 crisis, the sudden adoption of digital work methods to sustain business operations provoked a strong shift towards digitalization, forcing digital readiness. Family businesses’ successful innovativeness is linked to incentivization, business culture and employees’ attachment to the family business (Villani et al., 2023). Innovation approaches range from adaptive approaches such as customization to the adoption of opportunities for new products, services or technology (Clemente-Almendros et al., 2023). Open innovation strategies are preferred over closed innovation to strengthen the business’s ability to react to environmental challenges (Campopiano et al., 2019). The search for new business opportunities emphasizes dynamic capability and external resources (Hadjielias et al., 2022) to enable growth. To monitor growth, first-generation family businesses focus on first resiliency, whereas multigenerational family firms prioritize performance metrics, such as return on assets and return on equity (Arrondo-García et al., 2016).

Further, organizational resilience in family businesses benefits from fast and agile decision-making processes that facilitate strategy implementation (Acquaah et al., 2011). This is often bolstered by creativity due to centralized decision-making structures (Le Breton-Miller and Miller, 2022).

Effective management and governance practices are essential for organizational resilience. Business operations must balance robustness and agility across different organizational structures to maintain functional effectiveness and strengthen strategic implementation (Ingram and Bratnicka-Myśliwiec, 2019). This includes agility, less rigid mental models and openness to streamlining bureaucracy processes (Soluk et al., 2021). Solid crisis planning and management entail preparedness and the effective prioritization of governance policies (Škare and Porada-Rochoń, 2021). Control mechanisms ensure solid decision-making processes (Conz et al., 2020) and the attainment of strategic goals (Pal et al., 2014).

Active and focused knowledge management and exchange limit the risk of loss, particularly family-specific or tacit knowledge. Knowledge retention sets the foundation for future activities aligning operational and strategic experiences (Cucculelli and Peruzzi, 2020).

Adjusting risk behavior to protect the family business strengthens resilience, although family business literature presents divergent perspectives on risk behavior and appetite, arguing that family businesses are especially conservative (Berlemann et al., 2022). Following prospect theory, strong loss aversion allows for varying risk preferences and subsequent adjustments to protect SEW (Minichilli et al., 2016), influencing liquidity, financial constraints, investment and debt management. Similarly, the behavioral adaption of family firms towards financial constraints applies to debt and the securing of a sound financial structure (Amann and Jaussaud, 2012). This unique additional financial capital provided by the family, especially for debt or insolvency (Bertschi-Michel et al., 2023), is characterized by patient capital (Revilla et al., 2016) that does not target immediate or maximal profitability and is available to “actively wait” to regain investments. Instead of downsizing, family businesses are more inclined to pursue bootstrapping financing and raise short-term equity during crisis (Block and Ulrich, 2023). Evidently, liquidity safeguarding measures that cover both recovery and growth after crisis foster family business resilience (Wiatt et al., 2021). Family businesses may adopt an anti-cyclical investment strategy during crises, leveraging available financial resources. This is especially true of R&D investments and intangibles due to lower production costs and underused production capacity during crises (Sun et al., 2019).

In this study, the authors follow the argumentation of Hamel and Välikangas (2003), characterizing “strategic” resilience as continuous anticipation and adjustment instead of a single crisis response or differing crisis response paths (Shepherd and Williams, 2023). This understanding challenges process-based resilience definitions before and after a crisis (e.g. Danes et al., 2009; Czakon et al., 2023; Smith et al., 2023; Yilmaz et al., 2024) by proposing a continuum of organizational resilience, similar to the understanding elaborated on SMEs by Verreynne et al. (2023). This continuity requires the ability to draw from previous experiences and for anticipating and adjusting decisions, earning the business a competitive advantage during crises and opportunities for growth through learning. Prasad and Roy (2024) similarly conceptualize factors such as entrepreneurial orientation and survivability capital as antecedents instead of process factors on family business resilience.

Strategic activities for effective crisis response serve as fundamental principles of resilience across business types. In the unique context of family businesses, additional considerations related to identity, family involvement and family-centered values shape their approach significantly. A family business’s desire to preserve its socioemotional wealth (SEW) (Berrone et al., 2012) influences its collective motivation and shared values to ensure that strategic decisions align with the overarching vision for the family business. Family managers tend to prioritize maintaining strong and reliable relationships with employees or external partners, shaping a strategic choice differently than those motivated primarily by financial objectives. In contrast, an external manager might be more inclined to set strategic measures within the scope of their employment period or tied to remuneration. These resilience-related aspects of family values, identification with the business and emotional attachment shape the family businesses’ strategic decision-making. From a broader behavioral perspective, research confirms this in other business contexts (e.g. start-ups) by stating that resilience-related decision-making is shaped by contextual, social and heuristic biases which impact strategic changes to counter challenges (Baroncelli et al., 2024).

The decision-making process in selecting strategic activities requires a balanced approach that considers both external and crisis-specific factors as well as internal organizational priorities. According to previous research on family business resilience, long-term orientation and adaptability are both crucial for family business resilience (e.g. Yilmaz et al., 2024), yet their interaction presents a strategic tension. Long-term orientation, characterized by transgenerational commitment and patient capital, can provide stability in crises (Lumpkin and Brigham, 2011). However, it may also hinder rapid adaptability when rigid adherence to long-term strategies prevents necessary short-term pivots (Chrisman et al., 2011). Both the external crisis and the organizational structure have an impact on how long-term orientation promotes or hinders flexibility by generating synergies in their business management. In disruptive crises businesses, overly anchored in long-term strategies may struggle to pivot effectively (de Massis and Rondi, 2020), while businesses that seize to adapt flexibly to a more short-term oriented crisis response might be limited by financial constraints (e.g. due to a propensity for self-financing) or impeding family involvement to enable its adaptive capacity (Soluk et al., 2021).

The balancing of both strategies reveals an ambidextrous approach, viewing strategic activities as complementary and dynamic elements, rather than opposing or singular forces, for long-term success (Weiss and Kanbach, 2022). This ambidexterity is also consistent with resilience research examining the dual and simultaneous impact of preparedness and agility on entrepreneurial decision-making, thereby influencing resilience in SMEs (Delladio et al., 2023). The interconnection between both logics is essential, as their interplay forms the fundamental conditions necessary for fostering resilience.

The interaction between family specific and general business strategies shows a different level of strategic interplay, necessitating the strategic alignment of goals across both systems. This dynamic is also evident in the framework embedded in the sustainable family business theory (SFBT) (Stafford et al., 1999, 2010; Jang and Danes, 2013), highlighting the partial overlap and interaction of family and business systems in terms of resources, processes and capabilities required for long-term sustainability of family businesses.

This review focuses on strategies toward family business resilience. Based on the findings, the authors develop a conceptualization integrating the currently dispersed literature into a framework of resilience strategies that guides decision-making of family businesses for long-term sustainability.

Accordingly, this review makes a threefold contribution: it (1) reviews the research on family business resilience, (2) distills strategies on how to build family business resilience and (3) suggests an integrative and structured framework. The results of the inductive analysis showed that the current discussion of family business resilience includes multiple strategies that work in an interconnected and continuous way. By expanding the traditional scope of family business resilience to include a strategic view, the authors explored the dynamic relationships between family involvement, long-term orientation and family–business-specific approaches to finance and governance. This contribution enhances the understanding of the intricate dynamics at play to deepen academic research on family business resilience and to translate factors into actionable businesses’ strategies for long-term survival. Business leaders may be able to address issues before major economic turmoil by understanding how strategies can be designed to contribute to resilience in family businesses.

The framework makes a distinct contribution by systematically identifying strategic approaches and providing an actionable and integrative perspective on how family businesses enhance their resilience. While existing frameworks offer valuable insights into the structural components of resilience, they often lack specificity regarding the activities that drive resilience in family businesses (Yilmaz et al., 2024). By emphasizing actionable mechanisms rather than static definitions, this study contributes to the theoretical understanding of resilience as a managerial practice (Conz et al., 2023), shifting the focus from unidirectional causal effects of family business resilience to a more dynamic view. It underscores the interplay of strategies whose ambidextrous effects collectively shape resilience outcomes.

By challenging the idea that resilience follows a linear process, as suggested in process-based approaches to resilience (Fisher et al., 2019), the authors show that continuous adaptation and learning are essential for sustaining family businesses. It contributes to scholarly discourse by emphasizing that strategic initiatives may require time to yield effects due to their involved organizational changes, iterative refinement or cultural alignment, acknowledging the continuous and cyclical mechanisms at play to develop long-term resilience. The authors further broaden the scope on crisis response paths to include the “unique dynamics of family businesses […] (which) substantially contribute to the cultivation of strategic renewal capabilities, […] consequently enhancing resilience.” (Yilmaz et al., 2024, p. 77), including the influence of family business identity, culture and values. By differentiating between family and business, the approach ensures a comprehensive framework that accounts for the family–business-specific context in shaping effective decision-making on resilience strategies.

Further, this approach enhances managerial implications by providing a practical and comprehensive understanding of strategic mechanisms that strengthen family business resilience. The study provides actionable insights tailored to family businesses and owner managers, equipping them with adaptable, practically applicable strategies to navigate adversity and build resilience in family businesses. Rather than promoting rigid standardization, the findings present a structured yet flexible framework that supports effective decision-making under uncertainty while preserving the unique identity, culture and values of family businesses. These insights enable both managers and family members to balance short-term crisis responses with long-term strategic planning through a nuanced understanding of key strategic factors and their ambidextrous interplay. Beyond individual family businesses, this research provides practical value for the broader business ecosystem. The insights can be leveraged by public authorities to develop policies and regulations that enhance the adaptability of family businesses to foster economic resilience. Advisory, universities and business associations can use these findings to create targeted support programs that address the specific needs of family businesses, ensuring they have the necessary tools to build resilience in the face of uncertainty.

The study’s results highlight the current knowledge and identify limitations that suggest directions for future research. First, the lack of uniform definitions of resilience across studies limits comparability (Yilmaz et al., 2024). Advancing a shared understanding could improve analysis of different resilience strategies.

Second, resilience involves multiple strategic approaches and decisions interacting across business functions and stakeholders. Moving forward, the interplay between different strategies could be explored, such as the combination of two or more strategies at the same time, their coexistence within distinct business areas or the temporary predominance of one strategy over others, depending on the contextual demands.

Third, scholars widely recognize the need for future research to further incorporate the diverse nature of family businesses (Daspit et al., 2021). A more granular examination of managerial actions can reveal intricate resilience mechanisms, such as the interplay between inter-familial and organizational resilience (Al-Dajani et al., 2024), offering deeper insights into how different contexts shape resilience-building strategies.

Lastly, future investigations should assess comprehensive testing and measurement of strategic factors (Verreynne et al., 2023). An effective measurement scale would enhance the practical applicability and comparability of resilience strategies, allowing prioritization and informed decision-making.