Title
Exploring Resilience Capabilities of Nigerian Micro and Small Businesses during crises
Abstract
Resilience is becoming a top agenda among scholars and business professionals to deal with both environmental uncertainties and disruptions (Liu and song, 2020). Interestingly, research has found that most organisations that survive crisis build a fundamental capacity, termed as resilience capabilities - it refers to the substantive ability to achieve alternative functioning combinations and the knowledge, skills, abilities and processes for positive adjustment (Teece, Pisano & Shuen, 1997). As of today, the increasing interest in business resilience by scholars worldwide has produced a variety of conceptual frameworks to explicate resilient organisations (Burnard & Bhamra, 2011).
Despite the growing interest, there is limited knowledge and evidence that clarifies how resilience is developed and employed in different organisational levels. While research into business resilience to date has provided considerable evidence on resilience capabilities and its processes in large organisations (Ducheck, 2019; Branicki, Steyer & Sullivan- Taylor), less investigation has been reported on how small firms, especially micro and small enterprises (MSBs) achieve degrees of resilience (Alberti, Ferrario & Pizzurno, 2018) because resilience has been defined uniformly. For instance, resource-oriented research tends to suggest that resilience is the capacity to acquire resources or engage in strategic planning, which small organisations are incapable of.
Regardless, this study argues that MSBs may employ the advantages of less procedural options and processes to build resilience during crises (Mallak & Yildiz, 2016), suggesting that traditional planning may have little value to MSBs. However, there are few or no empirical evidence to explain this issue. This study addresses this gap by integrating and advancing three paradigms; adaptive or second-order resilience (Lee, Vargo & Seville, 2013), the dynamic capabilities framework (Teece, 2007), and mediating micro processes (Adrian & Breda, 2018) to propose a conceptual framework that describes micro and small business resilience capabilities in crisis times. The research is based on qualitative in depth interview with 20 MSB owner - managers in Nigeria.