Leadership in conditions of instability: an innovative model for enhancing organizational resilience

Human resource management (HRM) is one of the elements enabling an organization to remain competitive in turbulence conditions. The effective practice of HRM makes competent and innovative employees contributing to the achievement of organizational objectives. This study aims to analyze HRM practices in creating innovation and organizational performance. The questionnaire was used to measure the respondents’ perceptions of variables used by a Likert scale. A survey of 126 manager samples and middle managers at export-oriented short and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Bali, Indonesia, was conducted to test the model. The analysis has shown that the proposed model was proven to be compliant with the research hypotheses. HRM significantly affects organizational performance and innovation, and it was found out that innovation can improve organizational performance. However, in the process of simultaneous testing, it was found out that innovation cannot improve organizational performance. The lack of attention to investments in human resources became one of the barriers to SMEs in creating innovation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected different sectors of the economy, including insurance, and has become a problem and a clear catalyst for innovation. The pandemic has highlighted some inefficiencies of the traditional model of interaction between insurers and their customers and focused on insurance companies’ efforts on innovations and investments in the digital future. That is why the article aims to generalize the transformations of the institutional environment in the InsurTech ecosystem in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and identify prospects for its development in the post-pandemic period.
The analysis of the functioning of InsurTech as an ecosystem necessitated the identification of challenges for the insurance market in the context of COVID-19. The peculiarities of the insurance market development have been identified: the blurring of boundaries between insurers, BigTech firms, and technological partners; expanding interaction with policyholders based on the principle of support and the use of social networks; changes in the structure of the implemented insurance services; an increase in insurance fraud cases; the growing demand for parametric insurance products; introduction of a digital approach to the interaction with customers and employees, modernization of technological infrastructure and expansion of data processing capabilities; remote risk identification; acceleration in the use of financial technologies by insurance market participants. There is a transformation of the insurance market under the influence of business processes digitalization because insurers are aware of the importance of InsurTech in the formation of competitive advantages.
For many companies, the crisis has strengthened their innovative development strategies and accelerated the implementation of financial technology tools in their business processes against the background of modernization of technological infrastructure. Chatbots, telematics, the Internet of Things, machine learning, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, etc., are widely used. In the future, InsurTech will also play an important role in introducing digital innovations in the insurance market.

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has been widely touted as a fundamental ingredient for enhancing firm growth. Consequently, this aimed at examining the impact of EO and its dimensional variables (innovativeness, risk-taking, and proactiveness) on SME growth (employment, sales, and asset growth). Using information from 285 SMEs, the results obtained indicated that while EO had a significant positive association with SME growth (employment and sales growth), most SMEs show a moderate level of EO. Also, following the EO dimensions, the findings established the emergence of proactive innovation (a combination of proactiveness and innovativeness) which showed a significant positive association on sales growth. Risk-taking was the only factor that showed a significant influence on employment and asset growth. This study also showed that controlling for the effect of firm age on growth significantly reduced the error of predicting sales growth by 2.3%. This study culminates with recommendations on enhancing EO amongst SMEs in South Africa.