Tie strength, organizational resilience and enterprise crisis management: An empirical study in pandemic time

Abstract

It remains unclear how organizational resilience is shaped by tie strength and helps firms go through crisis under COVID-19 pandemic background. A survey conducted among a sample of 215 Chinese firms indicates that: (1) both external and internal tie strength enhance three dimensions of resilience capacity, namely situation awareness, adaptive capacity and transformative capacity; (2) all three resilience capacity dimensions facilitate reactive crisis management strategy, while only adaptive capacity and transformative capacity have positive effects on proactive crisis management strategy; (3) both reactive and proactive crisis management strategies improve crisis management performance. The study contributes to literature of organizational resilience by probing into the theoretical model of “tie strength-resilience capacity-crisis management strategy-firm performance” which implies that organizational resilience is driven by internal and external tie strength and then facilitates crisis management performance through reactive and proactive strategies. The findings provide managerial implications about successfully coping with crisis, such as global pandemic, by leveraging firm's resilience capabilities facilitated by social relationship and implementing reactive and proactive strategies.