Factors Underlying Organizational Resilience in SMEs

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are faced with a double challenge: a turbulent environment and a lack of resources. To face this reality, SMEs are called to develop adequate organizational responses. Organizational resilience (OR) has emerged in recent years as an appropriate solution. Indeed, this concept has received particular interest from researchers. It has been described as crucial for the company on the same level as performance and efficiency. Studies on SME’s resilience are relatively rare. Moreover, research in this area has been identified as an interesting area for future research. Hence the interest of this research which attempts to unpack the different determinants of resilience in the context of SMEs by proposing a conceptual framework that integrates the individual level, the organizational level and environmental factors to explain this resilience. The aim of this paper is to enrich the theoretical framework of organizational resilience, to broaden the framework of the study to a new context, namely SMEs, and to integrate the individual level, the organizational level and the environmental factors in a conceptual model.