The Formation Mechanism of Organizational Resilience of Enterprises in the Context of Anti-globalization: A Case Study Based on Huawei

Abstract

Drawn from a literature review, this paper extracts the research framework of the organizational resilience response process under global political risks, innovatively proposes the concepts of resilience foundation and resilience activation, which are ignored by the existing literature, and introduces them into the framework. Based on this framework, this paper adopts the vertical single case study method and chooses Huawei, which is subjected to U.S. sanctions, as example, to explore the formation mechanism of the organizational resilience of Chinese high-tech enterprises in the context of anti-globalization. The results show that:（1）Organizational resilience under global political risks depends highly on the ability to identify risks in the initial stage.（2）Resilience foundation and risk culture can explain whether enterprises choose to activate resilience after identifying political risks.（3）Increasing flexibility is the preferred direction for resilience activation, while increasing redundancy is a strategy of resilience activation in high-risk environments.（4）Resilience of each subsystem of the enterprise determines the overall resilience performance of the enterprise under political sanctions initiated by other countries.This paper has the following theoretical contributions: Firstly, it incorporates anti-globalization in other countries into unfavorable events that may cause organizational business interruption, constructs a theoretical model for Chinese enterprises to resist global political risks, and reveals the formation mechanism of organizational resilience in such special periods. Secondly, it innovatively introduces two constructs, resilience foundation and resilience activation, into the researches of the field of organizational resilience, and launches an in-depth analysis. Finally, it expands the scope of researches in the field of political sanctions, and explains how to maintain organizational resilience under political sanctions from the perspective of sanctioned enterprises, which supplements the existing literature. In addition, this paper provides the following enlightenment for Chinese high-tech enterprises that may be affected by global political risks: Proactive risk identification must be initiated, resilience foundation should be improved, resilience response should be activated in a timely manner, and strategic adjustments should be implemented accordingly.