Strategy-Performance Relationship Through Organizational Resilience: The Analysis of Tourism SMEs

This paper aims to analyze the strategy-performance relationship through the mediation of organization resilience in tourism SMEs. Primary data was collected from 760 managers of tourism SMEs in the top five tourism destinations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province of Pakistan using multistage cluster sampling through researcher-administrated questionnaires. Miles and Snow's classification of SMEs' strategic orientations as Prospector, Analyzer, Defender and Reactors was used. AMOS-SEM was applied to analyze the strategy-performance relationship and mediation of organizational resilience. The findings showed that strategy has a significant impact on organizational resilience and organizational performance. Organizational resilience mediates the strategy-performance relationship. Prospectors displayed the highest performance, followed by analyzers and defenders, while the performance of reactors was the lowest. This was cross-sectional research conducted in tourism SMEs in the Pakistani context. The sector is time- specific; therefore, a longitudinal study can be undertaken in national and international contexts. The government's support in developing organizational resilience is rudimentary in the tourism sector due to its high vulnerability to environmental jolts. This empirical research contributed to the least-researched sector of tourism SMEs in Pakistan operating in distinct segments of tourism SMEs.