What explains resilience of SMEs? Ambidexterity capability and strategic consistency

Abstract The ability to be resilient, to recover and bounce back when confronted with a threatening and stressful external event, such as the most recent global economic crisis, is an important issue for strategic management research, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Research studies on firm level antecedents of resilience offer contradictory propositions, some of which stress the need for experimentation, while others suggest focusing on reliability. To disentangle this controversy and face this gap, our study proposes that for SMEs to achieve resilience, it is necessary that these companies are able to efficiently respond to the changing environments through ambidexterity and strategic consistency. We test our hypotheses on a dataset of 2765 manufacturing SMEs and provide strong evidence for our model of antecedents of SMEs’ resilience.