Resilience of family firms to crises and development challenges: A theoretical analysis

Abstract

In a context of crisis, the challenges of consolidating gains increase and especially that of maintaining jobs and pursuing growth. The crisis of the COVID-19 constitutes in our eyes one of the major crises that has enormously upset and exposed the traditional mechanisms of intervention of public authorities everywhere in the world. Many companies were closed, and the recession was global. The need for resilience of business in our economies is becoming palpable. In this context, some forms of organization of work and production would be more resilient and towards which attention could be strategically advantageous for economies. The family firm, through its intrinsic characteristics linked to the structure of its capital, its culture, its strategy, its governance, its durability, its social, economic and human resources roles, theoretically reveals itself as a resilient form of organization despite its own difficulties.

The objective of this article is to understand, from a theoretical point of view, the resilience of family businesses in the face of crises, particularly that of the COVID-19 pandemic disease, through their capacity for absorption, renewal and appropriation. To achieve our results, we opted for the analysis of their capacity in the light of some theories of organizational finance in order to appreciate this point of view, and their repercussion on the resilience potential of these entities. The practical implication of this research will be to shed light on the capabilities of family businesses and to enable policy makers to develop incentive mechanisms for the formation of this form of enterprise, to boost, sustain and protect our economies.

The originality of this article lies in the fact that it combines the appreciation of three dimensions of organizational resilience and opens a path for empirical research to test the robustness of this theoretical position.

Keywords: Family business, Organizational resilience, Organizational sustainability, Development

JEL Classification: M10

Paper type: Theoretical Research