SMEs’ Adaptive Capabilities and Growth Intentions: Evidence across Different Disruption Types

This paper examines how growth intentions are shaped by adaptive capabilities across different types of disruption strands, using a sample of UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) observed for a five-year aftermath of Brexit. Our findings show significant heterogeneity in how different disruption strands are perceived by SME entrepreneurs and how these, in turn, influence growth intentions. Specifically, disruptions to capital investment, leadership training, export, and working practice are perceived as exogenous threats beyond entrepreneurs’ control, leading to lower growth intentions. In contrast, disruptions to innovation and workforce do not appear to reduce growth intentions, meaning that SMEs may leverage these disruptions to mitigate the negative effects or enhance internal efficiency. The role of adaptive capabilities is also differentiated. Innovation capability emerges as a general-purpose adaptive mechanism, underpinning consistently high growth intentions across all disruption strands. Export capability is generally associated with stronger growth intention, although its positive effect weakens under export-related disruptions. Training capability shows a limited effect on growth intentions, except disruptions to investment and export. Overall, the findings suggest that growth intentions are shaped by adaptive capabilities through different forms of resource orchestration, the effectiveness of which depends on their alignment with specific disruption types. These insights contribute to the literature on SMEs and crisis in entrepreneurship research and offer important implications for both research and practice.