Digging deeper into organisational resilience through strategic agility and strategic orientation: a study from the perspective of Sri Lankan SME leaders

Abstract

Fueling success in the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector requires a robust blend of organisational resilience and strategic agility to navigate the right strategies toward the ever-changing landscape of limited resources and constant dynamism. Therefore, leaders of SMEs need to play a prominent role in navigating the right balance of strategies towards organisational resilience. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of strategic agility on organisational resilience in times of economic uncertainty and by firm characteristics. Accordingly, raw data was collected in 2023 from 440 SME leaders using a structured questionnaire and data was analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics using SPSS and AMOS. The findings of the study indicate that strategic agility significantly enhances organisational resilience by decoupling strategic orientation in the SME sector. Findings further revealed that strategic sensitivity has a prominent role in fostering resiliency, particularly in medium-sized companies. Therefore, SME leaders need to identify enablers of organisational resilience in line with firm characteristics and uncertainty of the market and detailed attention to evolving strategic constraints is necessarily required through codifying strategic agility with strategic orientation into resilience capabilities which requires capturing and embodiment of organisational reaction to change.