Anais
Resumo do trabalho
Estratégia em Organizações · Processo Estratégico nas Organizações
Título
Dynamic resource configurations and organizational resilience in higher education: a configurational approach to strategic adaptation in times of economic crisis
Palavras-chave
organizational resilience
qualitative comparative analysis (QCA)
economic crisis
Agradecimento:
This work was carried out with the support of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel – Brazil (CAPES) – Financing Code 001 and also of the Nove de Julho University (UNINOVE), through the Scholarship Program for Researcher Training.
Autores
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Julio Cesar TeixeiraUNIVERSIDADE NOVE DE JULHO (UNINOVE)
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Leonardo VilsUNIVERSIDADE NOVE DE JULHO (UNINOVE)
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EMERSON ANTONIO MACCARIUNIVERSIDADE NOVE DE JULHO (UNINOVE)
Resumo
Introdução
Higher Education Institutions face recurring economic crises that significantly impact their financial and operational sustainability. Organizational resilience has become central, requiring efficient articulation of dynamic capabilities like strategic planning, innovation, adaptability, and technological competence to maintain academic activities in adverse contexts. Recent literature shows resilience as critical for overcoming economic shocks, particularly in private HEIs, highlighting strategic leadership, resilient culture, financial management, and adaptive capabilities.
Problema de Pesquisa e Objetivo
What combinations of management practices, internal resources, and dynamic capabilities have been mobilized by Higher Education Institutions to promote organizational resilience in contexts of economic crises?
Fundamentação Teórica
Organizational resilience is the ability to resist, absorb impacts, adapt and recover from disruptive events, manifesting across three temporal stages: proactive, adaptive, and reactive. In HEIs, resilience takes specific contours given their hybrid nature and multiple social functions. The Resource-Based View states sustainable competitive advantage derives from valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable resources. Dynamic capabilities emphasize organizations' ability to modify, recombine, and renew resource bases through integration, reconfiguration, and acquisition/release processes.
Metodologia
This study adopts crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA) due to its suitability for analyzing organizational phenomena with multiple interdependent causalities and heterogeneous institutional contexts. Based on set theory and Boolean logic, csQCA identifies causal combinations sufficient for outcome occurrence through truth tables and minimization algorithms. The approach is sensitive to equifinality and causal asymmetry, capturing institutional trajectory complexity. Twenty-five empirical articles covering 2,987 HEIs across 10 countries over 27 years were analyzed.
Análise dos Resultados
Causal configurations associated with organizational resilience were identified in both public and private HEIs across different economic categories. The csQCA method revealed eighteen distinct combinations of management practices fully explaining resilience occurrence, all with consistency and coverage equal to 1, demonstrating model robustness and confirming equifinality. Six minimized causal recipes were extracted, representing recurring explanatory patterns. Results show resilience emerges from multiple internal factors interacting with contexts.
Conclusão
This study analyzed causal configurations explaining how HEIs mobilize dynamic resources and capabilities to sustain organizational resilience during economic crises using csQCA methodology. Results revealed multiple strategic arrangements involving tangible and intangible assets combined with integration, reconfiguration, and acquisition/release capabilities generate resilient outcomes. Identified configurations showed complementarity, substitution, and compensation patterns according to institutional and economic constraints, reinforcing approaches sensitive to complex causality.
Contribuição / Impacto
From a theoretical perspective, this research advances organizational resilience literature by proposing a configurational typology integrating RBV and Dynamic Capabilities Theory from a neo-configurational perspective. The study applies causal sufficiency and equifinality logic demonstrating different internal architectures can support strategic adaptation in HEIs. Practically, it offers strategic combinations serving as configurational roadmaps to guide managers and policymakers in strengthening institutional strategies.
Referências Bibliográficas
Barney (1991) for Resource-Based View foundations, Eisenhardt & Martin (2000) and Teece (2007) for Dynamic Capabilities Theory, Ragin (2008) and Schneider & Wagemann (2012) for csQCA methodology, Fiss (2011) for configurational approaches, and specialized literature on HEIs resilience from Delgado-Abad (2022), Zahari et al. (2022), Mokhtar Abdullah et al. (2024), and Jayabalan et al. (2021). Witt et al. (2018) provided the economic regimes typology for contextual analysis.