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The Oak or the Reed: Digital Platforms and Organisational Resilience

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Thesis embargoed until 19th June 2028(2.87 MB)

Date

2025

Authors

Supervisor

Subasinghage, Maduka
Singh, Harminder

Item type

Thesis

Degree name

Doctor of Philosophy

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

Exogenous shocks create uncertainty that might negatively impact business activities. These shocks are sudden changes happening in the environment, such as pandemics, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and new regulations that impact business operations. When a shock occurs, organisations with a high level of resilience can continue their activities with little disruption. If it does not, businesses will be unable to survive, impacting their resilience badly. The literature discusses numerous strategies for responding to crises with resilience. Some key approaches highlighted are building and maintaining awareness, ensuring the availability of sufficient resources, adapting to evolving situations, and maintaining reliability. Implementing and using digital technologies, especially digital platforms, is one of the alternative ways of becoming more resilient, as they provide an opportunity to continue operations by making them more adaptable and reliable. Digital platforms provide benefits to businesses, such as lower transaction costs, availability of business information for customers and business partners, and the ability to access resources at anytime, anywhere for customers and businesses, but digital platforms diminish such benefits for various reasons. Digital platforms lower organisational resilience for at least three reasons, especially when businesses face exogenous shocks. Firstly, their processes and systems are increasingly tightly coupled to platforms and influenced by third parties (the platform owners), who may have differing incentives, weakening firms’ abilities to achieve their own goals. Secondly, firms will also need to update their knowledge bases to keep them relevant when they adopt platform-based business models, making it difficult to accumulate the extra knowledge needed to be resilient. Thirdly, firms may have to expend additional effort to process the huge volume of data they receive when they join digital platforms, limiting their attention to sensing and responding to changes in the external environment. With the lens of organisational information processing theory (OIPT) and by employing the case study method, this research explored how digital platforms affect organisational resilience during exogenous shocks. Data were collected from medium-sized cooked-food businesses in New Zealand that faced the COVID-19 pandemic and utilised digital platforms to conduct business operations. A total of three businesses and 15 people, including owners and managers, were interviewed to gather empirical data. Data analysis was conducted following the thematic analysis. Firstly, individual cases were analysed in detail, and their main themes were found digital platforms adoption including company-owned and third-party, managerial perception, and resilience outcomes. After conducting cross-case analyses, several intriguing areas emerged, including changes in business interactions with customers during the pandemic, the varying levels of support provided by digital platforms to different organisational tiers, and the negative impacts of digital platforms. The study's results revealed that adopting information technology is one major factor in fostering resilience during exogenous shocks. Moreover, the results highlighted that managerial perception of obtaining and using a platform is another factor that influences positive resilience outcomes. It is also aligned with reliability and adaptability, which ultimately achieve resilience. However, the negative aspects of digital platforms diminish some of the positive outcomes, discouraging businesses from adopting digital platforms during the crisis. This study contributes to the literature by showing how digital platforms influence the resilience of the organisation, especially in a crisis such as COVID-19. Also, the study contributes to the theory of OIPT using digital platforms, helping businesses to increase information processing capabilities and reduce information processing needs to reduce the information gap in times of shock. The study contributed to the practice by offering valuable insights to managers, such as informing business managers of the importance of digital platform adoption in times of shock and showing the importance of leveraging digital platforms to recover from exogenous shocks.

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Keywords

Exogenous Shocks, Organisational Resilience, Digital Platforms, Managerial Perception

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DOI

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Permanent link

http://hdl.handle.net/10292/19338

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Doctoral Theses