In times of fear turn to your competitor: Developing organizational resilience through coopetition

Organizational resilience has attracted attention during the COVID19 pandemic, as the magnitude of consequences threatened the survival of organizations and industries. When facing major crises, organizations may not be able to survive by their own means. We take an interorganizational level of analysis to understand how organizations can develop resilience by working with their competitors. We collected data in the tourism industry, and used a mixed coding approach, followed by thematic analysis and flexible patterns matching to structure our findings. We find that a major crisis triggered a sensemaking process, both at individual and collective levels, across organizational boundaries. This led to frame an effective crisis response, that is coopetition. Differently from prior literature we provide evidence how emergent coopetition helps build organizational resilience when facing a major crisis. Firms actively balance coopetition by selecting actions from a coopetitive repertoire, involving competition reduction and cooperation increase. The outcomes of emergent coopetition in response to crisis include survival and stable performance, but also unintended non-financial outcomes such formal and informal institutions, and norms of competition and coopetition. Our findings emphasize the role of social relationships in foster collective sensemaking and facilitating coopetition to develop resilience.