Empirical Evaluation of the Impact of Resilience and Sustainability on Firms’ Performance

The concepts of resilience and sustainability appear multi-dimensional and correlated, depending on the context. Operational sustainability practices can enhance the resilience of a firm, and support its growth. This study aims at analyzing the impact of a sustainability strategy, measured by means of a sustainability maturity index (SMI), on the financial performance of a company. Since the SMI is strictly correlated to resilience capabilities, the performed analysis represents a first level integration of the sustainability and resilience indicators in a common framework. A data sample from 53 organizations was collected through structured interviews and analyzed to identify possible relationships between the SMI and the financial performance indexes. The analysis does not support commonly reported arguments: we show that profitability does not show a significant relationship with sustainable strategic intent. Interestingly, firm country of origin, size of the organization, and market focus, likewise, do not have a significant relationship with SMI. Arguably, multi-dimensional company performance, including both financial and non-financial measures, should be considered to assess the impact of sustainability practices. Moreover, further investigations are needed to capture firms’ nonfinancial indicators of performance that are related to sustainability and resilience, for building up a unified framework enabling trade-off analysis.

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