Saggi sulla resilienza organizzativa e strategia di anticipazione

The purpose of this doctoral thesis is to investigate the choice of adopting an anticipation strategy of adversities in the small business context. The first paper is aimed to explore the organisational and individual (entrepreneurial) factors associated with the choice of adopting a strategy that aims to anticipate and prepare for potential threats for the business survival. The second paper is aimed to investigate the outcome of this choice, in terms of firm performance and in relation to the organisational structure. Building on the recent capability-based conceptualisation of resilience, the first paper aims to explore whether the experience of a previous crisis and entrepreneur resilience are associated with Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs’) adoption of different anticipation strategies for adversities. Using original survey data on 959 Italian and German SMEs, the research uses a multinomial logistic regression model in order to test the influence of the prior experience of a crisis and the entrepreneur resilience on the likelihood of adopting different anticipation strategies. The paper shows that the previous experience of a crisis increases the likelihood of regularly adopting proactive but non-formalised anticipation actions while decreasing the likelihood of adopting a pure reactive strategy to adversities; in addition, entrepreneur resilience is nonlinearly associated with anticipation strategies. The main originalities rely on eschewing a pure binary view in relation to the organisational choice of adopting a reactive or a proactive approach toward adversities and on considering the entrepreneur resilience as a factor with both ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ side effects in relation to the anticipation of adversities. The second paper is aimed to investigate the benefit of adopting an anticipation mentality in SMEs. Anticipation of adversities improves the potential resilience of a firm. However, no prominent studies have investigated (1) the influence of the adoption of a strategy that aims to anticipate and prepare for an adversity on the firm performance in a small business context, and (2) the role of the organisational structure in amplifying or diminishing the positive effects of the adoption of an anticipation strategy of adversities. The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the benefit of building potential resilience in SMEs and the role of the organisational structure. Using an original dataset of 409 Italian SMEs, our research uses a Generalized Structural Equation Modelling in order to test whether the adoption of an anticipation strategy of adversities influences the firm performance and whether there is a mediation effect of the organisational structure. Our paper shows the positive influence of the anticipation and preparation for adversities on the firm performance and the partial mediation effect of the coordination mechanism based on standardisation. The originalities rely on the investigation of the benefit related to the adoption of an anticipation strategy of adversity in small business context out of an actual crisis and the link that we suggest between organisational resilience and organisational structure. Cultivating the potential resilience of the firm and the coordination mechanisms based on standardisation means improving the performance even if an actual crisis does not happen.