Organisational resilience capacity and firm product innovativeness and performance

Abstract

The term resilience has attracted the attention of many researchers from a variety of disciplines; however, an organisation’s resilience capacity has rarely been addressed in the new product development literature. In this study, we empirically tested the role of organisational resilience capacity-related variables on firm product innovativeness and performance. By studying 112 firms, we found that competence orientation and original/unscripted agility are positively related to firm product innovativeness. We also found that with increasing levels of technological turbulence, original/unscripted agility, practical habits and behavioural preparedness are positively associated with product innovativeness, whereas competency orientation is negatively related. Furthermore, we found that product innovativeness mediates the relationship between resilience capacity and firm performance.

Keywords:

• organisational resilience capacity
• product innovativeness
• environmental turbulence

Notes

1. As intuition is an individual-level construct, in this study we use the ‘original/unscripted agility’ term instead of ‘counter-intuitive agility’ term.

2. In Table 2, we see that practical habits, behavioural preparedness and broad resource networks variables have two measurement items. While there is a common agreement in the literature that scales may often require more than three items to establish realiability (i.e. cronbach’s alpha), the usage of two items do not negate the value of the variables where such item measures are appropriate (Iacobucci and Duhachek 2003). Indeed, most of the studies utilise the two-item scales when the two items can tap the variable of interest. Also, as recommended, we assessed the AMOS-based composite reliability of each variable, which is similar to cronbach’s alpha as a measure of internal consistency but unaffected by scale length (Shamir et al. 1998). As shown in Table 3, all the composite scale reliabilities of the variables are equal or well above the .7 cut-off point. Further, as cronbach’s alpha is sensitive to serious departures from normality, and thereby skewness affects the estimation of error variance (Voss, Stem, and Fotopoulos 2000), we checked the skewness of these variables. Skewness of these variables range from −.757 to −.193, which are well below the level of 2 as indicated by Ghiselli, Campbell, and Zedeck (1981), indicating the normality of these variables.

3. Since environmental turbulence (i.e. technology and market turbulence), product innovativeness and firm performance variables are well established in the literature, we did not include them in the exploratory factor analysis.