Date of Award
Summer 2025
Document Type
Open Access Dissertation
Department
School of Hotel, Restaurant and Tourism Management
First Advisor
Robin DiPietro
Abstract
Hospitality and tourism organizations face persistent challenges that inhibit their smooth operations and threaten their long-term sustainability. Organizational resilience has emerged as a key strategy for ensuring continuity in the face of such disruptions. Resilience in this context has been conceptualized as a bounce-back ability or a return to normalcy after a shock. However, recent scholarship has advanced the concept of transformative resilience, which shifts the focus from mere recovery to transformation in response to disruptions. Transformative resilience emphasizes an organization’s ability to take advantage of disruptions, reconfigure its operations, and emerge stronger and more adaptive to future uncertainties. Despite growing interest in this concept, limited empirical research exists on how small hospitality and tourism businesses develop transformative resilience, particularly under uncertain environments.
This study bridges the research gap by investigating how small hospitality and tourism businesses in South Carolina develop transformative resilience in response to environmental uncertainty. Drawing on dynamic capability theory, contingency theory, resilience theory, and the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework, the study conceptualizes transformative resilience as an outcome composed of adaptability, agility, and opportunity-driven growth. It examines the direct and indirect effects of environmental uncertainty on transformative resilience and assesses the mediating role of dynamic capabilities (sensing, seizing, and transforming) in this relationship.
A quantitative research design was employed, utilizing Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze data collected from 466 small hospitality and tourism business owners and managers through a combination of online and face-to-face surveys. The results revealed that environmental uncertainty does not have a direct effect on transformative resilience. However, it significantly influences the development of dynamic capabilities, which in turn have positive effects on transformative resilience. Mediation analysis reveals that dynamic capability serves as a mediator in the relationship between environmental uncertainty and transformative resilience.
Overall, the findings of this study suggest that although small hospitality and tourism businesses often face resource constraints in responding to disruptions, their unique characteristics enable them to leverage such challenges as opportunities for strategic growth. Conclusions drawn from the findings highlight both the theoretical and practical implications for building transformative resilience in small hospitality and tourism businesses, as well as opportunities for future research.
Rights
© 2025, Alex Kweku Arhin
Recommended Citation
Arhin, A. K.(2025). Organizational Resilience Beyond Recovery: A Study of Transformative Resilience in Small Hospitality and Tourism Businesses. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/8507