The Adaptation of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises from an Incident of COVID-19: A Psychological Case Study of Myanmar

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a considerable proportion of businesses in Myanmar shut down in the second quarter of 2020, prompting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to implement strategic management approaches to sustain themselves in the present business landscape. The key purpose of this study is to examine factors affecting the performance of Myanmar SMEs focusing on their adaptation strategies during the COVID-19. This study used a well-structured questionnaire to collect data from 389 respondents who are SMEs business owners, managers and executives from food manufacturing enterprises which are based in Yangon region, Myanmar. POSDCoRB theory was employed as a strategic management tool to examine seven dimensions of adaptation strategies and multiple regression analysis was used to investigate the factors that significantly affect the performance of SMEs. Both qualitative and quantitative research approaches were applied in this research. In addition to regression analysis, eight small and medium enterprises out of 389 were selected using snowball sampling and interviewed to explore the challenges for their firms due to pandemic. Our findings reveal that, although different dimensions of POSDCoRB strategies show different effectiveness in improving firms’ performance, SMEs that adopt all dimensions of POSDCoRB adaptation faced smaller adverse effects from COVID-19 and have better post-COVID-19 performances.