SMEs’ adaptive capabilities and growth intentions: evidence across different disruption types

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines how heterogeneous disruptions shape SME growth intentions and how adaptive capabilities influence firms’ responses across different disruption strands. Using five-year longitudinal data on UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) during the Brexit period, we show that disruptions are not homogeneous external shocks but differ in how they affect SME growth intentions. Disruptions to capital investment , leadership training , and working practice lowering growth intentions are associated with lower growth intentions, suggesting that they weaken the financial, organisational, and managerial resource environment supporting future growth. In contrast, disruptions affecting innovation , export , and workforce are not associated with lower growth intentions, indicating that these disruptions may leave scope for SMEs to reconfigure available resources and maintain growth ambitions. We further demonstrate that adaptive capabilities do not contribute uniformly to SME growth intentions because they support different knowledge processes under disruption. Innovation capability is consistently associated with growth intentions across disruption strands, while export and training capabilities contribute only under specific disruption conditions. These findings extend research on SME adaptation and knowledge transfer by demonstrating that adaptive capabilities create value not simply through their possession but by enabling SMEs to acquire, integrate, transfer, recombine, and exploit knowledge in ways that align with the resource demands of different disruption strands. By showing that the effectiveness of adaptive capabilities depends on the alignment between disruption-specific resource conditions and capability-specific knowledge processes, the study thus advances a disruption-induced knowledge alignment perspective and open new research avenues that require further investigation into the contingent value of adaptive capabilities across different disruption contexts.