Management Review ›› 2024, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (2): 273-288.

• Case Studies • Previous Articles    

Growth through Adversity: An Exploration of How China’s Inborn Global Enterprises Develop Their Resilience in the Face of External Repressions—Exemplified by TikTok’s Response to the United States Ban

Liang Lin1,2, Duan Shiyu1   

  1. 1. School of Economics & Management, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin 300401;
    2. The Institute for Jingjinji Area Development Studies, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin 300401
  • Received:2021-11-02 Online:2024-02-28 Published:2024-03-30

Abstract: China’s inborn global enterprises (IGEs) are under increasing external continuous pressure. Whether they can develop resilience becomes a key for organizations to cope with the crisis and achieve survival and subsequent development. This paper adopts the vertical single-case study method, and takes TikTok, which was banned by the United States, as an example to explore how China’s IGEs develop their resilience in the face of external respressions typical of the current era. The study finds that: (1) the external pressure faced by IGEs can be divided into conventional and unconventional continuous pressure. In the two types of pressure scenarios, the development process, development strategies and manifestation of organizational resilience are different; (2) under the composite impact of the two types of continuous pressure, organizations adopt different resilience formation strategies; under the conventional continuous pressure, the development of organizational resilience depends on three strategies: strain, adjustment and self-improvement; under the unconventional continuous pressure, the development of organizational resilience also needs three special strategies: aggregation, reconfiguration and transmutation; (3) corresponding to the three stages of resilience development, namely, passive resistance, active response and reflective learning, the organizational resilience of IGEs is a three-level dynamic morphology of defensive ability, predictive ability, resolving ability and evolutionary ability. This paper constructs the research framework of “continuous pressure (stimulation) → organizational resilience development process (reaction) → organizational resilience morphological change (result)”, and clarifies the development process and three-level morphology of IGEs’ organizational resilience. It is not only a new exploration of the theoretical law of organizational capacity upgrading in China’s IGEs, but also provides practical reference for the crisis of China’s IGEs.

Key words: continuous pressure, inborn global enterprise, developmemt of organizational resilience, organizational resilience morphology