Effective Crisis Management during Adversity: Organizing Resilience Capabilities of Firms and Sustainable Performance during COVID-19

Drawing on crisis management and organizational resilience literature, this study adopts a firm’s capability-based perspective of organizational resilience to examine how different sets of firm-based resilient capabilities a firm has developed can help a firm achieve sustainable firm performance during a crisis. We took a configurational approach and applied the fsQCA method to examine how various combinations of a firm’s financial, cognitive, and behavioral capabilities as causal conditions can affect firm financial performance. For the empirical analysis, 21 listed Chinese film and television firms were selected. We collected information on financial capability from 2018 to 2020, and on cognitive and behavioral capabilities and firm size in 2020. This study obtains six configurations or paths that lead to the improved performance. Overall, the findings indicate that if a large firm has a low level of financial capability, it needs to leverage its cognitive capability instead of behavioral capability. A small firm with high financial capability needs to quickly leverage its cognitive capability but can use less behavioral capability. On the other hand, small firms with low financial capability need to utilize its behavioral capability to take quicker actions. With comprehensive analysis and multiple-perspective comparison of configurations, the study proposes various response strategic suggestions for firms with different sizes during the COVID-19 epidemic in China.