Purpose

The COVID-19 pandemic has entailed a critical situation for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) since restrictions on business activity have been imposed by authorities to reduce infections. The result is that SME managers must manage their firms through a crisis under very challenging conditions. The purpose of the present paper is to address how SME managers respond in the second “wave” of COVID-19 based on their perceived uncertainty as well as eventual learning from the first “wave” in early 2020.

Design/methodology/approach

Four hypotheses are presented, resulting in a theoretical model relating crisis impact, uncertainty, learning from crisis experience and effectuation behaviour. The theoretical model is tested through an empirical questionnaire-based quantitative study of Norwegian SMEs in the bar and restaurant sector, applying structural equation modelling as the analytical technique.

Findings

The results show that impact from COVID-19 leads to both uncertainty and learning and further that uncertainty primarily leads to a focus on affordable loss while learning leads to experimentation behaviour.

Originality/value

The present paper is novel in several ways. First, it empirically studies a unique situation where a crisis encompasses two “waves” of significant impact on the firms in focus. This provides the opportunity to address managers' learning through a crisis for application in a very similar situation later. Second, the present paper provides an empirically supported model of how uncertainty or learning leads to different dimensions of effectuation behaviour in a crisis situation.

中文翻译：

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中小企业管理者的危机学习与有效行为

目的

由于当局限制商业活动以减少感染，COVID-19 大流行给中小型企业 (SME) 带来了危急情况。结果是，中小企业经理必须在非常具有挑战性的条件下管理他们的公司度过危机。本论文的目的是解决中小企业管理者如何根据他们感知的不确定性以及从 2020 年初第一波“浪潮”中的最终学习来应对 COVID-19 的第二波“浪潮”。

设计/方法/方法

提出了四个假设，产生了一个与危机影响、不确定性、从危机经验中学习和影响行为相关的理论模型。该理论模型通过对挪威酒吧和餐饮业中小型企业的基于实证问卷的定量研究进行测试，应用结构方程模型作为分析技术。

发现

结果表明，COVID-19 的影响会导致不确定性和学习，而且不确定性主要导致关注可承受的损失，而学习导致实验行为。

原创性/价值

本文在几个方面是新颖的。首先，它实证研究了一种独特的情况，即危机包含对重点公司产生重大影响的两个“浪潮”。这提供了通过危机解决管理人员学习问题的机会，以便以后在非常相似的情况下应用。其次，本文提供了一个经验支持的模型，说明不确定性或学习如何导致危机情况下影响行为的不同维度。