Riassunto analitico
In today's environment of uncertainty and volatility, companies are challenged to develop capabilities that will enable them to deal effectively with events of an unforeseen nature, recovering from crises, and find opportunities for business growth. These capabilities are summarized in the concept of resilience or resilience capacity. Resilience has been studied in various fields, starting from the ecological view to studies devoted to organizational resilience, which have attracted wide attention in recent years. Nonetheless, there is a wide literature on resilience, there is a need for further study of the organizational capabilities that constitute resilience, and the conditions and/or dimensions that influence it. Moreover, it is interesting to relate them on post-disaster challenges and entrepreneurial behaviour.
In this context, the aim of this master thesis is to contribute to the literature regarding the organizational resilience of small and medium sized companies when a natural disaster occurs. Specifically, the thesis will be focused on the investigation of the organizational resilience constructs in its dimensions and how these are activated and utilized by small and medium-sized café and restaurant businesses affected by two disasters: the earthquake that hit Emilia Romagna in 2012, and the Covid19 which had a global dimension and impact. The goal is to assess their capacity of resilience and their ability to treasure the experience and preparedness matured in a previous natural disaster and thus be able to reuse them to cope with subsequent natural disasters, even of different nature, in a dynamic capabilities perspective. This is accomplished through a qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews on a sample of entrepreneurs.
The research will open with an initial chapter devoted to an assessment of the literature regarding the concept of resilience at the organizational, management and business levels. This will be followed by the second chapter, which is dedicated more to the resilience of SMEs and the strong connection studied between SMEs resilience and entrepreneurial resilience and then delves into the world of the Ho.Re.Ca sector and its business. The third chapter will deal with the occurrence of critical events such as natural disasters, describing their magnitude, causes, and direct and indirect consequences on business activities. Related to this will be explored the characteristics and factors that enable SMEs to experience a successful recovery process. The research will conclude with the fourth chapter, which will discuss the empirical research accomplished through a qualitative analysis, based on semi-structured interviews administered to a panel of bars and restaurants located in the area affected by the earthquake, and who therefore experienced both the disastrous event of the earthquake and the pandemic due to Covid19.
The qualitative analysis will allow to observe in depth, first individually and then in an aggregated manner, the dimensions that are activated and the capabilities used to face unexpected events and overcome them by seizing new opportunities. The analysis will follow a precise timeline, that sees the occurrence of the earthquake and then the pandemic crisis. Therefore, it will be interesting to understand from the answers given and from the strategies used by the entrepreneurs to face the two events, whether having experienced and overcome a critical event such as the earthquake could somehow have decreed a learning effect that then proved useful in managing the next event. The last part will be dedicated the analysis of results coming from the content analysis done on the interviews, drawing outcomes and conclusions.
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