Tactics of small and medium-sized enterprises in times of the COVID-19 crisis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.56652/ejmss2022.2.3Keywords:
SMEs, Covid-19 crisis, proactive and reactive tacticsAbstract
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are the foundation of any economy, and during the Covid-19 pandemic, they were at the center of the economic crisis. This was essentially the result, characteristic of SMEs, of a lack of sufficient resources to build a reserve for unforeseen contingencies. Therefore, the article’s main objective is to identify the tactics adopted by SMEs in response to the challenges of the Covid-19 crisis in its early stages, as identified by the results of an empirical survey of 538 SMEs in Poland and the Czech Republic. Overall, the results suggest that SMEs are lagging in building resilience to the Covid-19 crisis, are unable to cope with the limitations of operational skills and remain helpless in the face of not only the scale of the crisis but above predictability and the associated uncertainty about the future.
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