Organizational Resilience of Family Businesses
Organizational Resilience of Family Businesses

Summary/Abstract: Organizational resilience is a complex, strategic question that still lacks a clear answer, in particularrelating to whether and how it is beneficial for the competitive advantage of a family business. We defineorganizational resilience of a family business as a dynamic, ambidextrous capability to recover fromand positively adjust to an unexpected, adverse situation. In this study, using the strategic managementtheoretical background, we link organizational resilience to the competitive advantage of family businesses.We test this conjecture using data from 193 Polish small and medium-sized manufacturing familybusinesses. Drawing on these findings, we conceptualize organizational resilience along two dimensions:community robustness and creative agility identified as a key duality of organizational resilience in thecontext of family businesses. Results demonstrate that ambidextrous organizational resilience is positivelycorrelated with the competitive advantage of a family business. We discuss the contribution of the theoryof ambidexterity and dynamic capabilities to the understanding of organizational resilience, as well asthe implications of the latter for the creation of competitive advantage by a family.

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