CEO Resilience in Family Firms in Times of Crisis

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to understand the conditions that influence family CEOs’ resilience in times of crisis. Drawing upon social cognitive theory and adopting a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis analytic approach, the article analyzes data from 67 family businesses. The findings show that CEO resilience emerges from the interplay of different sets of conditions in single- and multi-generational family businesses. The study makes the contribution that CEO resilience is contingent on dynamics at individual, family, and business levels, suggesting that CEO resilience in crisis times reflects a “crisis bricolage” of “making do” with resources that are “in hand” and “within reach.”