Agility and Resilience as Sources of Competitive Advantages a Theoretical and Empirical Investigation

Today’s hypercompetitive global climate makes lasting competitive edge unsuitable. Firms face increasing complexity due to the rapid entry and growth of internationalizing firms from emerging markets, technological breakthroughs, discontinuous innovation, and the uncertainties surrounding unexpected shocks transmitted across world markets, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. In this research, I examine how firms have built and applied two adaptive abilities (agility and resilience) to respond to environmental changes and disruptions to create sustainable competitive advantage. An agile organization is simultaneously a resilient organization. Despite agility’s increased relevance in the academy and practitioners\u27 publications, its epistemological and ontological analyses are superficial at best. Specifically, supported by inductive and deductive analysis, I bring clarity to agility’s concept and its boundary conditions. Thus, I propose an integrative multilevel framework of the antecedents, the enablers, and the outcomes of the process of agility performance. Moreover, through in-depth interviews with executives, I explore how agility and resilience manifested in emerging market multinational firms (EMNEs) enhance their competitiveness by using both adaptive abilities in their international operations. The findings reveal that all organizations possess some degrees of agility and resilience simultaneously as two faces of the same coin. Furthermore, agility and resilience are interdependent, comprising five common domains