Catolica Lisbon School of Business and Economics, Portugal
Even though research on organizational resilience has advanced significantly, it often overlooks the varying resilience of different organizational forms in response to external shocks. To address this gap, we analyse resilience heterogeneity of family-owned, family- managed businesses and their counterparts in the context of a global crisis event. Grounded in stewardship theory and leveraging the socioemotional wealth perspective, we operationalize organizational resilience by examining deviations in firm performance relative to counterfactual performance across three critical phases: the “steady state” pre-shock, post-shock, and shock periods. We posit that family ownership and management act as key enablers of organizational resilience. Using a proprietary longitudinal dataset of 2,202 listed companies in India, we find robust evidence that both family ownership and family management significantly enhance organizational resilience. However, our analysis reveals that the positive impact of family management on organizational resilience diminishes in the presence of business group affiliation. Furthermore, we categorize firms into four cohorts based on performance trajectories – antifragile, robust, scarred, and fragile – and assess how family involvement influences resilience within each group. Finally, our study has policy implications, by highlighting the resilience and importance of providing support to family enterprises, given their ubiquity and economic importance, as they play a critical role in economic stability.
