Abstract
As the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic leads to multiple business failures globally, scholars are still confounded by what causes some businesses to fail while others, including those in the same industry, survive. In addressing this question, this study seeks to determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for the B2B businesses failure vs business survival due to the COVID-19 crisis. The study was operationalized in India, informed by 16 in-depth semi-structure interviews with the owners and/or senior management of B2B firms. The cases covered the most affected sectors such as travel, tourism, catering, hospitality, and agricultural exports. Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) technique was used to analyze the coded and calibrated fuzzy scores. NVivoTM was used for the word frequency analysis and word cloud development to create fsQCA calibrations. The study found three and two causal configurations for the business failure and business survival phenomenon, respectively. The absence of collaborative capability with key stakeholders was observed as key to the business failure, though the absence of leadership adaptive capability and the ability to leverage government support were also observed in two of the three causal configurations. The presence of leadership adaptive capability and collaborative capability were present in the two causal configurations observed for the business survival. Contrary to common viewpoints, digitalization capability was not sufficient to prevent failure or necessary to ensure survival. By focusing on the capabilities in the firm as the conditions that differentiate business failure to survival, we seek to progress the rich scholarship relating to the dynamic capabilities’ theory.