Strategic Orientations and Organizational Resilience: The Moderating Role of Digital Technology

Firms pursuing organizational resilience face competing demands: sustaining growth while reducing performance volatility. This study examines how strategic orientations shape trade-offs between these resilience dimensions and how digital technology breadth and depth moderate these strategy–resilience relationships. Drawing on dynamic capability theory, this study analyzes panel data from Chinese high-tech manufacturing firms to investigate how profit-oriented and growth-oriented strategies affect two dimensions of organizational resilience—growth resilience (continuous growth) and volatility resilience (performance stability). Results reveal two distinct mechanisms: a consolidating mechanism whereby profit-oriented strategy reduces performance volatility while constraining growth resilience, and a capitalizing mechanism whereby growth-oriented strategy strengthens growth resilience while increasing performance volatility. Digital technology breadth moderates both strategies but introduces complexity costs that weaken anticipated volatility reduction benefits. Digital technology depth shows limited moderating capacity, amplifying profit-oriented strategy’s growth constraints without significantly reducing performance volatility. This study contributes to organizational resilience literature by demonstrating that organizational resilience dimensions involve systematic trade-offs rather than complementary gains, and extends dynamic capability theory by identifying strategic orientation as a driver that shapes how firms configure and deploy dynamic capabilities toward different organizational resilience outcomes. For managers, these findings suggest aligning strategic orientation with organizational priorities for stability versus growth, recognizing that enhancing one resilience dimension may constrain another, and ensuring digital technology investments match strategic priorities, as broad adoption introduces complexity costs that may offset anticipated benefits.