Searching for resilience: the impact of employee-level and entrepreneur-level resilience on firm performance in small family firms

Existing research on resilience varies across fields on analysis and presents scattered and diverse definitions. For example, the literature suggests that resilience in organisations is influenced by factors of various levels, occurring at both the individual and organisational level. However, there are currently few insights into how these different levels of analysis interact with each other. Therefore, focusing on resilience in the context of entrepreneurship, this paper aims to explore the relationship between the employee-level resilience dimensions (cognitive, behavioural and contextual) and entrepreneurs’ perceived performance, and the moderating role of entrepreneur resilience. A survey has been conducted with 195 entrepreneurs managing small family firms. Results confirm the hypothesis that the dimensions of employee-level resilience affect performance positively when the entrepreneur has a strong propensity towards personal resilience. Entrepreneurs may use these insights to increase awareness of their actions towards achieving organisational resilience and to implement practices aimed at increasing employee-level resilience.