Crisis influenceability and the contingent role of entrepreneur's resilience in SMEs

Abstract The resilience of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) is increasingly vital in today's unpredictable economic landscape. Understanding how different types of crises impact financial performance and recovery time can help entrepreneurs develop effective strategies to navigate challenges. Building on a contingent approach on organizational resilience, this paper explores how external and internal contingencies affect an organization's resilient response when coping with a crisis and tests its hypotheses on an original dataset comprising 417 Italian, German, and French SMEs. Results indicate that crises that are limitedly influenceable lead to greater financial losses and require longer recovery periods. Furthermore, the findings show that the entrepreneur's individual resilience exerts a contingent moderating effect on the resilient response, depending on the environment in which the crisis originated. The study contributes to the process‐based perspective on organizational resilience by advancing a contingency approach and adds to the few studies that examine the relationship between adverse events and resilience responses. From a managerial perspective, it suggests that although the individual resilience of the entrepreneur is important, it is not sufficient on its own. Therefore, SMEs should also focus on developing organizational resources to effectively overcome crises.