Knowledge management, operational resilience and export performance: moderating roles of strategic flexibility and maturity of digital transformation in emerging markets

Purpose – This paper develops and tests a model centered on the critical role of operational resilience in driving export performance in an emerging market within a global, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous environment. We investigate how knowledge management capability can reinforce operational resilience to improve export performance and explore how strategic flexibility and digital transformation maturity shape these effects. Design/methodology/approach – We tested the model using data from 400 manufacturing firms from Bangladesh, collected through a multi-wave survey with responses from two mid-level managers per firm. Through a structural path analysis, we explored the intricate connections between KMC-based strategy, operational resilience and export performance. The direct and mediation effects were analyzed using Mplus 8 and Python packages. Specifically, the moderation effects and the Johnson–Neyman (J–N) plot were tested using the Python PyProcess package. Findings – The findings confirmed the robustness of our conceptual model. Further analysis revealed that strategic flexibility has a stronger moderated mediation effect than the firms' maturity of the digital transformation. Originality/value – The study advances a unique integration of the information processing view with the knowledge-based view of the firm in exploring key factors underlying the export performance in emerging market firms. By establishing how pre-shock capabilities, such as strategic flexibility and maturity of digital transformation, serve as essential components for improving a firm's operational resilience we add to the export managers' toolkit for improving export performance.