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Corporate resilience in times of COVID-19 crisis: the role of risk management, sustainability and transparency

Image of Family Ownership During the Covid-19 Pandemic

by Ariela Caglio in collaboration with University of Lausanne

 

Corporate reactions to crisis are not uniform. Similar to individuals and countries, some organizations hit barriers and face immense economic and social hardships. Others react swiftly and adapt to the new circumstances. Some of them even thrive under times of uncertainty.

To delve into this phenomenon, we study corporate resilience in times of crisis, using the COVID-19 pandemic as research context. Through a quantitative, firm-level analysis of a large US and global sample, we investigate corporate characteristics leading to higher resilience.

Although prior studies in various social science disciplines including management, economics and psychology, have stressed the importance of resilience especially during disruptions such as COVID-19, the drivers of corporate resilience are still underexplored.

In this study, given the lack of previous research, we focus on risk management, sustainability and transparency to offer novel insights on the factors underlying corporate resilience by answering the following questions: Do more resilient organizations have more advanced risk management systems? Are firms that integrate sustainability into their business models more resilient to crisis such as COVID-19 than those that do not? What is the role of disclosure and transparency in such context?

 

 

Ariela Caglio has received funding from the Institute of Management Accountants Research Foundation (IMA, USA) for the project ‘Sustainable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and new communication technologies. From a ‘push’ to a ‘pull’ notion of value and corporate reporting’, (PI, with P. Quattrone) 2020-2021