Impact of Strategic Agility on Business Continuity Management (BCM): The Moderating Role of Entrepreneurial Alertness: An Applied Study in Jordanian Insurance Companies

This paper presents an introduction and identification of business continuity management under the influence of strategic agility. Consequently, this study investigating the underlying dimensions of strategic agility and business continuity management in the presence of entrepreneurial alertness with special emphasize to Jordanian Insurance companies. The results of the study indicates that operational agility is the most mature agility at Jordanian Insurance companies, and it works better with the presence of entrepreneurial alertness to get efficient and effective business continuity management. Methodology of the study: Quantitative in approach, focused on data collection by closed questionnaire conducted for Jordanian insurance companies. Through SPSS application first assessment of theoretical model is performed.


Introduction
Nowadays the service companies become essential for any economy in the world as well as manufacturing ones since they make significant contribution for employment level.Insurance sector is a wide and huge sector in service companies in Jordan because the Jordanian insurance sector has strong potential for growth but still give its low penetration level of 2.13% compared to a global average of 6.23% due to a number of challenges, such as low disposable income and rising unemployment rates, lack of awareness and understanding of insurance and mitigation of risk amongst the population, particularly in terms of personal insurance such as life and fire insurance.A sizeable proportion of the population cannot afford insurance, and of those that can, many rely on family or state resources for life cover and old-age care.
The sector has a well-educated workforce but the majority lack technical expertise.Moreover, the most pressing issue, arguably, for the sector is then mandatory motor third-party liability insurance sector; the premiums on third-party liability insurance are regulated at below market rates according to industry insiders, which have resulted in the majority of market players recording losses from that business line.
 Reflects the effective dimensions of strategic agility in Jordanian insurance companies that affect the business continuity management.

Research Problem
Today, strategic agility is essential for the sustainability and continuity of any business compete in this sever globally environment.Insurance companies which are one of service providers have made a significant contribution in adding value for the customers.Entrepreneurial alertness is critical to be responsive, adaptive and flexible business.As a result this study will try to define what dimensions of strategic agility affect business continuity management.Accordingly, try to answer the main question "what is the impact of strategic agility on business continuity management of Jordanian Insurance companies in the presence of Entrepreneurial alertness".

Business Continuity Management (BCM)
BCM evolution passed through different stages according to business needs and environmental turbulence; first it started from Disaster Recovery planning (DRP) in United States banks between 1950s-1960s, the target was to protect critical information by taking backup; thus the focus was protecting the computer systems and their data centers instead of whole organization.Second: in1990s the shift was from DRP to Business continuity planning (BCP) with broader intention to protect whole organization's critical services from any critical incidents.Third: from mid 1990s until now, BCM approach appear to include whole organization and its external factors that affect it (Abu baker, Yaacob, & Udin, 2015).
BCM can be defined as: ''a holistic management process that identifies potential threats to an organization and the impacts to business operations that those threats, if realized, might cause, and which provides a framework for building organizational resilience with the capability for an effective response that safeguards the interests of its key stakeholders, reputation, brand and value-creating activities'' (British Standard Institution, 2006, p. 1), Herbane conceptualized BCM as a process of number of activities that based on business continuity planning, thus testing, training and updating are essential for successful BCM.(Elliott, Swartz, & Herbane, 2010), (Herbane, 2010).
BCM viewed as risk management approach based on business value to keep business from any kind of threats that may result from different types of interruptions (Terrorism, Utility outage, Product contamination, Labor disruption, fire, ….).(Business Continuity Management, 2014).According to previous definitions; BCM is essential to have best practice organization that stimulates changes in culture and resilience (Sawalha, Anchor, & Meaton , 2015).
To understand BCM, Various factors that affect the succession of it must be known.From these factors are: project management, maintenance, technology, business continuity benefits, top management commitment, organization readiness and individual competency (Hoong, 2011), Strategic management, risk analysis, information, life cycle management resources, documentation, training and awareness.(Karim, 2011).Management support, organizational readiness and alertness.(Järveläinen, 2013).
Therefore, the researcher defines the BCM in terms of the following sub-variables (Everest, Garber, Keating and Peterson, 2008, 3).

Management Support
Adequate and proper support from management through keeping on business continuity planning by assigning qualified people, enough resources and budgets.Organization's management identify specialized group to define required standards and best practice to ensure BCM.

Risk Assessment and Risk Mitigation
Identify potential risks and its probabilities due to threats, then potential impact to the organization are determined.This is done at division level to ensure that the all possible risks are understood and managed appropriately.Risk assessment includes impact and probability of disruptions of all business, operational, and IT areas, and considers acceptable downtime.

Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
Identify business processes that may cause disasters in the business unit functioning and determine the required recovery for these processes.
Sawalha, Anchor and Meaton (2015) mentioned that after identifying potential risks and critical functions, a business impact analysis is performed.BIA involves an assessment of the impact of risks on business critical functions and subsequently on the continuity of business operations.This lays the foundation for the development of backup and data recovery strategies which will be the focus of the next phase.

Business Recovery and Continuity Strategy
Details the recovery strategy in terms of actual steps, people, resources, communication and protocols, taking into consideration the organization's standards.Recovery time adequately reflects how much downtime the organization is willing to tolerate.Within the BCM, the organization has set testing requirements for the organization wide continuity functions, business lines, and support functions.The BCM capabilities and documentation are maintained to ensure that they remain effective and aligned with business priorities.

Strategic Agility
In competitive global markets that characterized with rapid technological changes, customer needs fluctuations and increasing innovations; traditional organizations' strategies and approaches are not able to face these challenges; therefore, significant changes become critical to improve its competitive ability in this business environment.Agility is recognized as new challengeable pattern for competitive organizations.Several researchers define agility from different points; some academics define agility as: a business's ability to quickly adapt and adjust strategic direction of its core business in response to rapidly changing environmental conditions (McGaughey, 1999;Bessant et al., 2001).Dove, (2001) characterize agility as the ability to remain competitive by effective knowledge management and focus on quickness in responding to turbulence, and clarify that speed areas are: time to market new products, time to process an order or service request, time to reconfigure organizational processes and systems to react to certain changes, and so on.Wadhwa and Rao (2003), differentiate between agility and flexibility; where agility means innovative response to large unpredictable changes that require control of group of systems, on another side flexibility is simply response to small-medium and predictable changes that needs focus on single system.Sambamurthy, define strategic agility as dynamic and complex variable that consist of three aspects: customer, operational (internal) and partnering agility (Sambamurth, Bharadwaj, & Grover, 2003).While, Arteta and Giachetti (2004) refer to the ability of proactive action towards change.
Doz and Kosonen (2010), Arbussa,Bikfalvi, &Marquès, (2017), analyze strategic agility into three metacapabilities: strategic sensitivity, leadership unity and resource fluidity, which allow the company to "perceive early, decide quickly, and strike with strength and speed".Now a day the agility concept is applied widely in supply chain not in rigid organizations.

Customer Agility
Ability of organization to detect business opportunities from customer's feedback, so customer voice is considered to build its competitive action (Atapattu and Sedera, 2013).
Roberts and Grover, clarify that customer agility consist of two key components: sensing and responding which are influenced by market orientation (Roberts and Grover, 2012).Wherease; Vagnoni, argue that strategic agility entail the following components: customer sensing capabilities, customer responding capabilities and customer learning capabilities (Vagnoni and Khoddami, 2016).

Operational (internal) Agility
Ability of the firm to rapidly redesign the business processes based on the need to exploit new opportunities.(Sambamurthy, Bharadwaj and Grover,2003), comment that operational agility also build on the accuracy and effective cost to change with greater flexibility and speed.Finaly, (Glicor, Holcomb and Feizabadi, 2016) clarify that operational agility tied with supply chain agility.

Partnering Agility
Ability of the firm to get opportunities through building efficient supplying, manufacturing, logistics and customer support (Sambamurthy et al., 2003).From other side, it means ability to enhance its competitive position by making access to external competencies, resources and any other assets, through building strategic relations (Vagnoni et al., 2016).

Entrepreneurship Alertness
The first critical step for business succession is identification of opportunities which is considered entrepreneurship alertness.According to Kirzner (1979) entrepreneurial alertness refers to ability to discover unnoticed and overlooked business opportunities without searching and the utilization of resources to make benefit of these opportunities to create value.Kirzner (1979), mention that there are certain characteristics of entrepreneurial alertness that differentiate it from conventional economic resources.(1) Entrepreneurial alertness does not indicate the weak possession of enough knowledge of market opportunities; (2) Entrepreneurial alertness is non-deployable and tacit (3) There is no market for hiring entrepreneurial services, and entrepreneurship cannot be seen in terms of demand and supply and (4) Entrepreneurship is costless.Kirzner (1997) describes entrepreneurial alertness as "an attitude of receptiveness to available, but hitherto overlooked, opportunities", while Kirzner (2009) refers to alertness as "a sense of paying attention to what might be 'around the corner".Aviram, (2010) defines alertness as: "a concept defining a situation which can be described as a continuous state of being "on call".

Research Model and Hypothesis
The researchers have formulated main hypothesis according to the following conceptual model to describe and analyze the impact of entrepreneurial alertness on improving the impact of strategic agility on business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies.

Independent Variable Dependent Variable
business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies at level (α ≤ 0.05).

Research Design and Methodology
This study is descriptive, quantitative in nature, based on both primary and secondary data.It starts with literature review that explores the variables of the study (strategic agility; business continuity management; and entrepreneurial alertness).Our literature review enabled us to design a conceptual framework.An Applied study has been designed to test the model; therefore, primary data collection was based on a questionnaire (appendix 1) which was randomly distributed to Jordanian insurance companies based on equal stratified random sampling.Items used in the questionnaire were based on a Likert scale.

Population and Sample
The population of the current study consists of (24) Jordanian insurance companies listed in table (1)

Validity Test
To test validity, the survey instrument was distributed to a sample of universities professors and professionals to determine whether the survey was clear, understandable, and measured appropriate content.Feedback provided by them indicates that changes were necessary in the wording and format of the survey; all notes were taken in consideration for forming the final copy of the questionnaire.

Reliability Test
Reliability refers to the degree that the dimension is free of accidental errors and offer constant data and is expressed as a coefficient.The coefficient ranges from (0, 00-1.00),so if the coefficient is high this means the reliability is high and vice versa.Table (2) showed that reliability coefficients for all items were above 0.60% used in the current study.The reliability coefficients for all the items ranged from (0.777 to 0.970).Hence, the current study's questionnaire items were all of reasonable satisfactory reliability.It is clear from the table that the males represent (71%) of the study sample, while the age category 30-less than 40 years are the largest by (34.1%), and the academic qualification (Bachelor) is the greatest percentage (85%), also the experience category (From 5-less than 10 years) formed the greatest percentage (67 %), this consists with the natural administrative pyramid in the Jordanian insurance companies, and consists with the study's unit analysis.

Descriptive Analysis for study Variables
The descriptive statistics of the constructs used in the proposed research model can be shown table 4. All means were above the mid-point of 2.5 and all of the variables were classified "high".
The results show that the majority of respondents express generally positive answers to the variables used in the research model.The results in table 4 also show the importance degree and the rank for each item in the questionnaire.

Testing the Hypothesis H0.1:
There is no significant impact of strategic agility on business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies at level (α ≤ 0.05).
To test this hypothesis, the researchers use multiple regression analysis to ensure the impact of strategic agility with its dimensions: (customer agility, operational agility, and partnering agility) on business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies.Table 5 shows that the impact of strategic agility with its dimensions on business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies.The regression model achieve a high degree of fit, as reflected by "R" (0.800) and " R " value (0.640), which asserted that (64%) of the explained variation of business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies can be accounted for strategic agility with its dimensions: (customer agility, operational agility, and partnering agility).
Since the (α) value is less than (0.05), it shows a statistically significant impact between the variables at (0.95) confidence level.
So, rejecting the null hypothesis and accepting the alternative hypothesis, this states: "There is significant impact of strategic agility on business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies at level (α ≤ 0.05)".

H0.2:
There is no significant impact of entrepreneurial alertness on improving the impact of strategic agility on business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies at level (α≤0.05).
To test this hypothesis, the researchers use the multiple hierarchical regression analysis to ensure impact of entrepreneurial alertness on improving the impact of strategic agility on business continuity management at Jordanian insurance companies.As shown in Table (6).A hierarchical regression or moderator regression has been recommended by many scholars as the technique for analyzing the moderating effect (Frazier, Tix, & Barron, 2004).
Table 6 shows results of the Hierarchical Multiple Regression based on two models, since the results of the first model reflected on the first step, the presence of the impact with statistical significance of the independent variable (strategic agility) represent by (customer agility, operational agility, and partnering agility) together on business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies, since F value= (75.742) with significance level Sig F= 0.000, which is less than (0.05), and determination coefficient (R 2 =0.640) indicates that (strategic agility dimensions) collectively explained (64%) of the resulting variance in the (business continuity management).In the second step: (entrepreneurial alertness) variable is inserted in the regression model, R 2 value increased by (4.5%), this percentage with statistical significance, since ∆F value = 69.119,and (Sig ∆F=0.000) which is less than (0.05), and (β=0.284) at (entrepreneurial alertness) and (t=4.288), with (Sig = 0.000) this confirms the significance impact of entrepreneurial alertness on improving the impact of strategic agility on business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies, since the total variance explanation percentage improved by (4.5%) to raise from (64%) to (68.5%).So, rejecting the second null hypothesis and accepting the alternative hypothesis, this states: "There is significant impact of entrepreneurial alertness on improving the impact of strategic agility on business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies at level (α≤0.05)".

Discussion
The service sector in which insurance companies are large segment of it; has become a prominent and has recognized itself as a major force in the global economy.
As any service company strategic agility is important to keep business continuity as it deals all the way with changeable customers' needs and unstable business environment; thus the case at Jordanian insurance companies.The study reveals after testing the model that operational agility is the most effective agility on business continuity at Jordanian insurance companies while customer agility is the least, which reflects those customers' needs in Jordanian markets toward insurance still limited and somehow stable.From other side, the operational agility is crucial in Jordan for insurance companies since it is found in very turbulent business environment.Thus, this study offers useful insights and opens new avenues to conceptualize how strategic agility might affect business continuity management in the presence of entrepreneurial alertness in Jordanian companies.

Conclusions
This study investigate business continuity management at Jordanian insurance companies in the presence of strategic agility with its different dimensions and in the presence of entrepreneurial alertness, it found that this sector in Jordan markets has many challenges to be able to continue such as: big investment in latest technology and in its human resources to be able to continue and to be more responsive and flexible with its customers.It is found that this sector needs agile and entrepreneurial management to connect employees with customers and to be able to sustain strategically in the market.

Recommendation
This study can be considered one step in investigating what can affect business continuity management in the presence of agility and entrepreneurship at Jordanian markets focused on insurance companies.Other researchers can continue this study on the same sector but under different independent variables, or can study other sector for service provider companies to get full picture of the Jordan markets.

4. 1 . 5
Plan Awareness, Training and Maintenance Education and awareness of the BCP are critical to the execution of BCM.Training and practicing for portions of BCP is also critical.

Table 2 .
Values of Cronbach's Alpha for the study variablesThe following Table3presents the demographic variables of the study which includes (gender, age, Academic qualification, Years of Experience).

Table 3 .
Distribution of the sample according to demographic variables (n = 132)

Table 4 .
Descriptive analysis for study variables

Table 5 .
Multiple regression analysis to ensure the impact of strategic agility with its dimensions on business continuity management in Jordanian insurance companies