İşletmelerin Dijitalleşmesi Ve Covıd-19 Salgınına Verdikleri Tepki Arasındaki İlişkinin Ölçülmesi

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is a crisis that has affected the whole world and deeply damaged businesses. The unexpected emergence of the pandemic and the unpredictability of its progress have been a burden on businesses, and most have faced the risk of bankruptcy as they have been through hardness. However, the COVID-19 pandemic is neither the first nor will be the last global crisis. Therefore, it is significantly important that businesses should be prepared to deal with such crises at any time for their survival. One of the essential tools to cope with these crises is digitalization. This study aims to analyze the relationship between the digitalization of Turkish businesses and their reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main divergence point of the research has derived from its attempt to empirically analyze the relationship between the digitalization of Turkish business and the COVID-19 pandemic period for the first time in the existing literature in Turkey. One hundred twenty-three businesses in Ankara have participated in the survey conducted under this study. The difference tests have pointed out that the businesses’ levels of adoption of digital technologies diverge related to the businesses’ size, whereas the COVID-19 coping strategies differ in regard to their level of digitalization. The correlation and regression analyses have provided the results that there is a positive direction relationship between businesses’ level of digitalization and COVID-19 coping strategies, and the effect of the level of digitalization on COVID-19 coping strategies is statistically significant. The study contributes to the existing literature and the field through its findings.