Factors Impacting SME Business Resilience Post-COVID-19

Abstract

The ability of an organization to respond to a crisis with agility is vital for business leaders to maintain business continuity. Our paper examined how business owners responded to the challenges caused by the pandemic. Using online surveys for data collection, we investigated a critical agility issue of supply chain risks through understanding the interrelationship of various business capability factors. Partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) was applied to a sample of 220 participants who were owners of micro, small, and medium businesses in Western Australia. The findings showed that the businesses’ efficiency, financial strength, and flexibility in sourcing affected the businesses’ supply chain risks negatively. More support for labor productivity, asset utilization, waste elimination, financial reserves, portfolio diversification, and credit access needs to be introduced to enhance the resilience of the business supply chain. This paper is novel, as we used the data collected in Western Australia, where the SMEs were still affected by the global supply chain disruption but lacked protracted lockdowns, as had occurred nationally and globally during the COVID-19 period.