The measurement and discriminant analysis of enterprise resilience

ABSTRACT

The current environment is complex and uncertain. COVID-19 not only brings challenges to the government’s public health governance, but also disrupts the industrial supply chain and poses a crisis to the survival and transformation development of enterprises, which has raised severe tests to the resilience of enterprises and has also become an important issue for scholars to study. The existing academic research and practical experience show that resilience is the key ability to support enterprises to survive the crisis, and stability and adaptability are the main characteristics of resilient enterprises. Stable performance improves enterprise operation efficiency, and adaptability improves strategic flexibility. This paper focuses on the quantitative study of enterprise resilience, analyzes the relationship between stability and adaptability from the perspective of paradox, and selects efficiency and flexibility as discriminant variables from the outcomes of resilience. Based on the financial data of the resilient enterprises and the control group, the variables affecting the resilience of enterprises were determined by discriminant analysis and the measurement indexes were constructed to establish the calculation method of enterprise resilience. By calculating the scores of resilient enterprises and the control group, it is found that the scores of resilient enterprises are significantly higher than the control group in terms of stability and adaptability, which verifies the paradoxical relationship between them. This shows that the resilient firm is not an either-or choice between stability and adaptability, and there is a continuously distributed behavior space between them. Therefore, resilient enterprises adapt to the changing and highly uncertain business environment through constant change and innovation while maintaining the bottom line of survival in the crisis. © 2022, Editorial Board of Journal of Systems Engineering Society of China. All right reserved.