Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Navigating Through the Covid Pandemic in India: an Examination Through the Systems Approach

In past couple of years, management scholars have developed significant literature on the impact of Covid pandemic across various business and organizations formats. Although, the extant literature studied various aspects of SMEs, but they did not explore the pandemic impact to SMEs from the lenses of the systems approach. We examined how SMEs navigated through the Covid pandemic from the systems theory. We engaged narrative inquiry method and captured narrations from CEOs/board members of thirty SMEs in India. The grounded theory approach was adopted to analyse the data. The study found that SMEs' navigation through the pandemic was a complex and dynamic system encompassing input factors, immediate output, systemic output, navigating strategy, and policy environment. At the end, the study developed system-theoretic ecosystem framework of Covid impact on SMEs.