From Short-term Survival to Long-term Development: A Review and Prospects of Organizational Resilience of Family Businesses

Liang Qiang, Zhang Jiamei, Xu Yuanrui

Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 47, Issue 09, pp. 120 - 136 (2025)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20231106.101

Summary

Strong organizational resilience can help enterprises cope with emerging opportunities and challenges in a complex environment. Previous studies have verified that family businesses are more resilient than non-family businesses. From “starting from scratch” to “keeping the family business evergreen”, family businesses have made progress from short-term survival to long-term development. But these studies have neglected the coherence of organizational resilience in the process of realizing long-term and short-term goals. Under the complicated and diverse situation of COVID-19 epidemic, market economy transformation, and international turmoil, enterprises need to not only overcome the crisis to achieve short-term survival, but also face the creep pressure lurking in the daily management and changing environment to pursue long-term development. Based on the review of 115 related researches on organizational resilience of family businesses in 683 related literatures at home and abroad, this paper sorts out the research topics of organizational resilience of family businesses on the basis of refining the research context and conceptual dimension of organizational resilience, constructs the logical framework of “family factors–organizational resilience–corporate performance”, and further discusses the future research topics of organizational resilience of family businesses in the Chinese context.

Keywords

family businesses; organizational resilience; long-term orientation