Received:
2020-12-30 | Accepted:
2021-02-21 | Published:
2021-03-30
Title
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Resilience of SME’s in Lithuania
Abstract
The article focuses on a relevant scientific and practical problem of the present, i.e., the resilience of organisations in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim is, upon analysing the response of organisations to the threats related to the COVID-19-caused restrictions on economic activity, to identify the predominant behaviour of organisations that predetermines their resilience. The theoretical part discusses the leadership aspect of the heads of organisations and the ability of organisations to survive in the conditions of uncertainty. The findings of the research in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) of Klaipėda Region are presented. The research methods chosen to deal with a scientific problem in the theoretical part include an analysis of literature sources, systematisation, synthesis, generalisation, and comparison. In the empirical research, quantitative research, i.e., a questionnaire survey and data processing methods, was applied. Due to the specificity of the region, the majority of the surveyed business entities (71.3%) are from the services sector, while the rest of the surveyed companies belong to the manufacturing (15%) and trade (13.7%) sectors. The research established that most of the organisations surveyed benefited from the government support. On assessing the survey data and summarising the response and efforts of organisations to deal with uncertainties, a conclusion was drawn that SMEs' response to uncertainties was mainly focused on the protection against threats and avoidance of risk, however, the organisations lacked preparedness and consistency when dealing with unforeseen circumstances.
Keywords
organisational resilience, small and medium-sized enterprise (SME), COVID-19 pandemic
JEL classifications
M12
, M21
URI
http://jssidoi.org/jesi/article/769
DOI
Pages
53-65
Funding
The research was conducted in the framework of the research project Assessment of the Effectiveness of COVID-19-Related Restrictions on Economic Activity and the Impact of State Intervention Measures on Enterprises in the Klaipėda Region (No. P-COV-20-51), funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT). The duration of the project has been 6 months (28 06 20 to 31 12 2020). Grant Agreement Number P-COV-20-51.
This is an open access issue and all published articles are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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