Growing pains: how strategic postures can help and hurt sales growth during periods of severe turbulence

Severe turbulence, as evidenced during major crises over the past 15 years, challenges the effectiveness of taken-for-granted strategic stances such as entrepreneurial or digital postures, which are likely to be developed during typical business cycles. Our longitudinal study investigates how firms can protect, or fail to protect, sales growth under the atypical conditions of severe turbulence, depending on their adoption of entrepreneurial and digital postures and their trajectories from pre-turbulence growth. Our findings reveal a paradox: firms with high levels of pre-turbulence growth experience weaker post-turbulence growth when pursuing either a digital posture or an entrepreneurial posture or some combination of both. Instead, firms are most successful in increasing growth when they paradoxically minimise their postures, adopting a “no-posture” stance. Conversely, a no-posture stance proves particularly disadvantageous for firms with low pre-turbulence sales growth leaving these firms in the least favourable position once turbulence subsides. We unpack key mechanisms that explain the paradox.