Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises, Organizational Resilience Capacity and Flash Floods: Insights from a Literature Review

Skouloudis, Antonis, Tsalis, Thomas, Nikolaou, Ioannis, Evangelinos, Konstantinos and Leal Filho, Walter (2020) Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises, Organizational Resilience Capacity and Flash Floods: Insights from a Literature Review. Sustainability, 12 (18). p. 7437.

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Abstract

From a managerial standpoint, sustainability poses numerous challenges for the business community. One of the prominent concerns in the context of organizational sustainability is the impact of climate change and extreme weather events (EWEs), which create discontinuity and damages to business operations. In this respect, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are particularly vulnerable to EWEs, such as flash floods, having disastrous consequences to SMEs that tend to be ill-prepared. Taking into consideration that these negatives effects are also transferred into the local communities in which SMEs are located, it is crucial to create appropriate mechanisms that will enable these enterprises to build relevant capacities and acquire necessary resources in order to deal with relevant disruptive events. With this in mind, this paper attempts to delineate the emerging literature in relation to strategic approaches in dealing with high impact/low probability EWEs. With this analysis, we aim to provide insights for enhancing the robustness of SMEs against such natural hazards through effective resilience and adaptation strategies. The paper reveals that resilience to EWEs is indeed a multifaceted issue posing numerous challenges to SMEs. Taking into account their intrinsic characteristics, there is a need for a holistic management approach that will assist SMEs to safeguard their assets against extreme weather.