Employee Training in SMEs: Effect of Size and Firm Type—Family and Nonfamily

The study examined the main and interaction effects of size and firm type on a variety of informal and formal training programs in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Samples of 448 family and 470 nonfamily SMEs were separated into four size groups and differences were assessed using multivariate analyses of variance. The results point to prevalence of informal training for all sizes and an increase in adoption of formal, structured, and development-oriented training with increasing firm size (especially for firms with 20–99 employees). This pattern was evident for nonfamily but not for family firms. For family firms, formal training programs increased significantly during the critical growth phase only (20–49 employees). Gaps in employee training between the two types of firms were greatest at 50–99 employees but narrowed thereafter at 100–199 employees. The approach to employee training in family SMEs is in consonance with their slower growth, informal management styles, limited financial resources, and greater emphasis on efficiency compared with nonfamily SMEs.     

You Support Diversity,But Are You Ethical? Examining the Interactive Effects of Diversity and Ethical Climate Perceptions on Turnover Intentions

Efforts to identify antecedents of employee turnover are likely to offer value to organizations through money saved on recruitment and new-hire training. The authors utilized the stakeholder perspective to corporate social responsibility to examine the effects of a perceived climate for ethics on the relationship between diversity climate and voluntary turnover intentions. Specifically, they examined how ethics climate (employees’ perceptions that their organization values and enforces ethically correct behavior) affected the diversity climate–turnover intentions relationship. Results indicated that ethics climate moderated the diversity climate–turnover intentions relationship. Turnover intentions were lowest among workers perceiving both a pro-diversity and highly ethical climate. These results reinforce the need to communicate both diversity values and ethical standards to employees.     

You Support Diversity,But Are You Ethical? Examining the Interactive Effects of Diversity and Ethical Climate Perceptions on Turnover Intentions

Efforts to identify antecedents of employee turnover are likely to offer value to organizations through money saved on recruitment and new-hire training. The authors utilized the stakeholder perspective to corporate social responsibility to examine the effects of a perceived climate for ethics on the relationship between diversity climate and voluntary turnover intentions. Specifically, they examined how ethics climate (employees’ perceptions that their organization values and enforces ethically correct behavior) affected the diversity climate–turnover intentions relationship. Results indicated that ethics climate moderated the diversity climate–turnover intentions relationship. Turnover intentions were lowest among workers perceiving both a pro-diversity and highly ethical climate. These results reinforce the need to communicate both diversity values and ethical standards to employees.     

Employee cooperative behavior in organizations: a vignette experiment on the relationship between training and helping intentions

The mutual‐investment model predicts a positive relation between investments in training and employees’ willingness to behave cooperatively. In this paper, we argue that the extent to which employees increase their cooperative behavior after receiving training depends on the type of training provided, the skillfulness of the employee and the cohesiveness of the team. Focusing on intentions to help coworkers as an indicator for cooperative behavior, we conducted a vignette experiment among 2388 employees working in 127 organizations from four European countries. Multilevel analyses show that training increases employees’ intentions to help coworkers. Training promotes helping intentions the most when organizations provide general instead of firm‐specific training and when given to employees with limited skills. Whereas employees in cohesive teams indicate higher intentions to help coworkers than employees in non‐cohesive teams, training promotes helping intentions equally in both types of teams.     

Returning the favor: positive employee responses to supervisor and peer support for training transfer

Drawing on social exchange theory and associated notions of reciprocity, we argue that interpersonal support for training transfer in the workplace is associated with increased employee task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) and reduced turnover intention. We test our hypotheses using survey data from 786 Chinese retail employees. The findings show that when employees perceive high levels of supervisor/peer support for training transfer, they are more likely to deliver higher levels of task performance and OCB in response, which in turn, lead to reduced turnover intention. We also found that the strength of the relationship between supervisor/peer support for training transfer on individuals’ OCB varied across regions within China. The results confirm the moderating role of regional context (coastal and inland regions) on the relationship between supervisor/peer support for training transfer on individuals’ OCB, with a stronger effect found in less economically developed inland regions. The moderating effect of region indicates that cross‐cultural researchers need to be aware of possible within‐country variations in employee attitudes and values.     

Resources,home institutional context and SMEs’ exporting: Direct relationships and contingency effects

Research highlights the role of resources in SMEs’ exporting but is less forthcoming with respect to entrepreneurial perceptions of home institutional quality. Drawing on institution-based lenses, we distinguish among formal, informal, and regulatory institutions, which in concert with firm resources are expected to influence SMEs’ export behavior. Our predictions are tested on a sample of 150 firms located in Greece. The analysis of direct relationships shows that formal and informal institutional dimensions affect significantly, but differently, SMEs’ export activity. The analysis of interaction effects demonstrates that resource decisions for exporting are contingent upon entrepreneurial perceptions of the home institutional context, such that SMEs respond to formal and informal domestic institutional weaknesses by intensifying resource allocations to fuel export sales. In an opposite direction, export regulatory complexity reverses the positive resources-exporting link. These findings suggest the importance of home institutions in the exporting field.     

Workplace Flexibility Practices in SMEs: Relationship with Performance via Redundancies,Absenteeism, and Financial Turnover

This workplace flexibility study uses primary data on private sector small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in Lancashire, United Kingdom, collected in 2009 during the recent “credit crunch” recession. Key features include: (1) objective measures of SME performance; (2) a focus on the previously relatively neglected relationship between workplace flexibility practices (WFPs) and three SME performance indicators, namely, redundancies, absenteeism, and financial turnover; and (3) a timely contribution to research on SMEs. Numerical, functional, and cost WFPs analyses, via zero‐inflated Poisson and linear regressions, control for SME and market characteristics. Despite SMEs having limited resources, the results show a significant section of SMEs to be innovative and entrepreneurial organizations, embracing advancements in employment relations regarding employee discretion, training, participative working arrangements, and/or job security. Moreover, results indicate that WFPs have the potential to assist SMEs in responding to periods of constrained demand. Flexitime and job sharing are associated with low permanent‐employee redundancies. Training, job security, and family‐friendly practices relate to low absenteeism with reductions of up to six annual days per worker. Job security and profit‐related pay are associated with high financial turnover. Staff pay‐freeze links with high financial turnover, but to the detriment of redundancies and absenteeism, whereas management pay‐cuts or management pay‐freeze relate to low financial turnover. On a cautionary note, spending cuts, often enforced by policymakers, may be of limited benefit to SMEs, and thus other approaches would appear more fruitful.     

Reaching the boiling point: Consumers' negative affective reactions to firm-attributed service failures

While anger is the dominant affective reaction following service failure, little research focused on its potentially damaging effects. Our study examines the impact of anger and related negative affective states on evaluations and behavior following firm-attributed service failure. Gender's moderating role in shaping these consequences is also studied. Scenarios involving failures in a bank and a retail store are used. Overall, angry customers are less satisfied, give lower service evaluations, have higher perceptions of injustice, and give weaker ratings of corporate image. Angry customers also less likely spread positive word of mouth and more likely complain, exhibit negative repurchase intentions, and engage in third-party action. Related negative states differentially impact cognitive evaluations and post-purchase behavior with anger (rage) being the most important predictor in a bank (retail) setting. As the intensity of the negative affective state increases, customers more likely engage in effortful consequences. Gender of the customer and the service employee play minimal roles influencing evaluative and behavioral outcomes.     

Predicting electronic commerce adoption in Chilean SMEs

The Theory of Planned Behavior is used to predict a variety of behaviors, but its use in dealing with predicting e-commerce intentions in small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and in developing countries is limited. We use the TPB to model intentions to adopt e-commerce among 212 managers/owners of SMEs in Chile. Hierarchical regression results show that the subjective norm and attitude constructs positively and significantly predict intentions, but the perceived behavioral control construct does not. Results can be used by developing countries, especially those in Latin America, to encourage the adoption of e-commerce among SMEs.     

Employee age and voluntary development activity

It is known that older workers undertake less formal training than younger ones, but little information is available about age-patterns in voluntary development activities undertaken in an employee’s own time. In a study of 1798 manufacturing workers, age and ten other factors were examined in relation to four types of activity: participation in a tuition refund scheme, learning in an employee development programme, attendance at an employee development centre, and use of a personal development record. Significant age- differences were found, and key influential factors were identified as older workers’ lower educational qualifications (representing both cognitive and affective differences) and their more limited learning motivation (linked to lower learning confidence and greater perceived time constraints). However, older individuals who had previously undertaken each form of development were as positive about that previous activity as were younger participants. Possible interventions to increase voluntary development at older ages include rewards for participation, enhancement of basic skills, pretraining in appropriate learning strategies, sequential exposure to graded learning demands, and steps to change organisational stereotypes of older staff.     

Company support for employee volunteerism: Does size matter?

This article examines the relationship between company size and support for employee volunteering. Based on organizational ecology and organizational stages theory, the study hypothesizes that larger versus smaller companies demonstrate greater formalization and codification of their support for employee volunteering. Similarly, larger versus smaller companies use employee volunteering efforts more strategically; this finding is consistent with a need to justify decisions. These outcomes in turn impact the nature of volunteering and the organizations benefiting from such programs. Survey data from a size-stratified sample of 990 randomly selected Canadian businesses indicates that large companies support employee volunteerism in a more formalized and strategic manner than small companies. This behavior includes having formal policies and programs, as well as exercising greater influence over the causes which benefit from employee volunteering. Additionally, large companies are more likely to tie other forms of charitable support to employee volunteering. The article discusses how the more formalized approach of large companies may impact society.     

Gamification of employee training and development

Gamification has become increasingly common in employee training. Simultaneously, our scientific understanding of gamified learning has grown. However, there are few resources that provide specific recommendations for science‐based gamification in employee training to address the research–practice gap. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to describe our current scientific understanding of gamification as it can be used to realistically improve web‐based employee training. First, because gamification is commonly misunderstood, we explain what gamification is in the context of training. Second, because gamification is commonly misapplied, research on the effectiveness of gamified learning as related to training design is reviewed. Finally, to provide a clear roadmap for training design, we describe a formal process for gamifying web‐based training in a scientifically supported way.     

Ethical Codes of Conduct and Organizational Context: A Study of the Relationship Between Codes of Conduct, Employee Behavior and Organizational Values

Codes of ethics are being increasingly adopted in organizations worldwide, yet their effects on employee perceptions and behavior have not been thoroughly addressed. This study used a sample of 613 management accountants drawn from the United States to study the relationship between corporate and professional codes of ethics and employee attitudes and behaviors. The presence of corporate codes of ethics was associated with less perceived wrongdoing in organizations, but not with an increased propensity to report observed unethical behavior. Further, organizations that adopted formal codes of ethics exhibited value orientations that went beyond financial performance to include responsibility to the commonweal. In contrast to corporate codes of ethics, professional codes of ethical conduct had no influence on perceived wrongdoing in organization nor these codes affect the propensity to report observed unethical activities.     

Overcoming the double hurdles to investing in technology

Technological activities of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have received considerable attention from researchers and policy makers since the mid-1980s. Small firms could nurture entrepreneurship and facilitate the creation and application of new ideas. In spite of their potential in generating innovations, it is also observed that SMEs shy away from formal R&D activities, and the firm size itself seems to be a barrier for R&D activities. SMEs operating in developing countries face extra hurdles to investing in R&D. Given the massive share of SMEs, it becomes crucial to realize their developmental potential in developing countries. In this paper, we study the drivers of R&D activities in SMEs in Turkish manufacturing industries by using panel data at the establishment level for the 1993–2001 period. Our findings suggest that SMEs are less likely to conduct R&D, but if they overcome the first obstacle of conducting R&D, they spend proportionally more on R&D than the LSEs do. R&D intensity is higher in small than in large firms. Moreover, public R&D encourages firms to intensify their R&D efforts. The impact of R&D support is stronger for small firms.     

The effect of decision makers’ time perspective on intention–behavior consistency

This research demonstrates that decision makers?? time perspective??a cognitive, temporal bias that leads people to overemphasize the past, present, or future in their decision making??systematically influences self-reported behavioral intentions and thus intention?Cbehavior consistency for distant-future behaviors. Whereas present-hedonistic individuals overstate their intentions, present-fatalistic individuals understate theirs, so both types exhibit low intention?Cbehavior consistency. Future time-oriented individuals instead exhibit high intention?Cbehavior consistency because they are less likely to overstate their intentions. The findings are contributed to decision makers?? time perspective influencing the construal of distant-future behavior when reporting behavioral intentions. Accounting for decision makers?? time perspectives helps improve predictive accuracy and may change insights obtained from causal models that use self-reported intentions as a proxy for actual, distant-future behavior.     

Product Innovation in Small and Large Enterprises

Innovation networks, establishment characteristics and the regional environment are likely to play different roles in product innovation in enterprises of different size. This paper focuses on the influence of the regional environment on the early adoption of micro-electronic components in product development in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises (LEs). Drawing upon existing literature we compare the role of enterprise characteristics, innovation networks and, in particular, the regional environment for an early use of micro-electronic components in product development in SMEs and LEs using a tobit model. Our central hypothesis is that SMEs are more dependent upon their regional environment than LEs for an early adoption. However, this hypothesis is rejected by our empirical results that show that location in a large, dense region has a significant positive effect on product innovation in LEs, while it has a negative but non-significant effect on product innovation in SMEs. Our results imply peripheral regions are able to provide an innovative environment for SMEs, whereas LEs need the richer environment offered by the core regions. The results are also interesting from a policy point of view because they indicate that SMEs can be early users of new technologies even if they are located outside the large urban areas.     

Human capital and structural upheaval: A study of manufacturing firms in the west bank

Firms in various worldwide locations are repeatedly subjected to radical political, economic, and social upheavals, including changes in administrative governance, new economic paradigms, natural disasters, and warfare. Perhaps because of the difficulty of conducting research in these environments, little is known regarding the unique requirements of entrepreneurs and their business organizations in such troubled locations. Reliable research and information is necessary in order to design and assess methods of providing institutional support both during, and after, such turmoil.Based on data collected from field interviews over a six-month period, this article examines the characteristics of the owners of 64 small manufacturing businesses that have undergone or were experiencing radical political and economic upheaval in the West Bank town of Ramallah in the Palestinian Territories. The objective of the study is to examine characteristics that influence and assist an entrepreneur's resource allocation decision-making processes. This was done by comparatively assessing the effects on profitability of both firm and individual assets in a highly constrained rapidly changing environment. Understanding this allocation process will lead to more effective targeted assistance in regions experiencing or exiting environmental transitions and upheavals.Human capital theory is utilized in this study as a framework for understanding the comparative response of owners to reallocate resources under the stressful environment of the pre- and post-intifada West Bank territories. While human capital has been well studied in literature examining resource allocation in “typical” competitive environments, our understanding of the influence of human capital in transitional environments is quite limited.This study provides some useful, and perhaps surprising results, from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Owner's human capital (coded from formal education) was found to impact profitability only with the micro firms studied (those with three or fewer employees), however, it is possible that this finding reflects dilution of human capital in comparatively larger small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). One interesting departure from similar studies is that experience was not found to affect the profitability of the firm. Plant capital, on the other hand, was found to be associated with the profitability of only larger SMEs, controlling for business age and experience of the owner. This finding is significant because, presently, institutions such as the World Bank, NGOs and national development agencies focus their efforts primarily on providing credit to small businesses, whereas training and education currently are somewhat out of favor.A model is proposed in this study comparing resource requirements according to both the size and the productivity/technological level of the firm. The object is to explain the reduced importance of human capital and experience in environments of radical transition, specifically the arbitrary nature and lack of predictability of transitional governance, and the increased importance of financial capital only with large SMEs. It is argued that skills acquired in functional expertise do not necessarily prepare an entrepreneur for the abrupt environmental transformations characteristic of tumultuous political events. This research suggests that owners are in a better position to maximize their cognitive skills in decision making within smaller organizations. However, these skills are naturally diffused and so less effective at influencing the outcomes of somewhat larger organizations. Larger SMEs are necessarily more capital intensive and more bureaucratic, and so the cumulative human capital at the organizational level may be more important to allocative efficiency than the human capital of the individual firm owner. Further, larger SMEs require organizational expertise that may not be captured in the individual level characteristics of entrepreneurs.This research suggests that efforts to support such environments should carefully consider the size of the firms in question before designing and implementing programs of assistance, differentiating microenterprises from small businesses. In particular, the findings of this study suggest that smaller firms experiencing rapid environmental upheaval will benefit most from formal education, training and advice. Larger firms, in contrast, appear to benefit most from loans providing traditional capital support, and from advice across the entire firm's human capital base, particularly regarding organizational management and delegation skills.     

Corporate Social Responsibility and the Social Enterprise

In this article, we contend that due to their size and emphasis upon addressing external social concerns, the corporate relationship between social enterprises, social awareness and action is more complex than whether or not these organisations engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR). This includes organisations that place less emphasis on CSR as well as other organisations that may be very proficient in CSR initiatives, but are less successful in recording practices. In this context, we identify a number of internal CSR markers that may be applied to measuring the extent to which internal CSR practices are being observed. These considerations may be contrasted with the evidence that community based CSR activities is often well developed in private sector small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) (Observatory of European SMEs, 2002), a situation which may be replicated in social enterprises especially those that have grown from micro-enterprises embedded in local communities. We place particular emphasis upon the implications for employee management. Underpinning our position is the Aristotelian-informed capabilities approach, a theory of human development and quality of life, developed by Sen (1992; 1999) and Nussbaum (1999) which has been developed further, in an organisational context, (e.g., Cornelius, 2002); Cornelius and Gagnon, 2004; Gagnon and Cornelius, 1999; Vogt, 2005. We contend that the capabilities approach offers additional insights into CSR in social enterprises in general and internal CSR activity in particular. Our article concludes with proposals for future research initiatives and reflections upon social enterprise development from a capabilities perspective.     

Imperfect information and labor market bias against small and medium-sized enterprises: a Korean case

We examine the labor market’s bias against small and medium-sized enterprises focusing on the Seoul Digital Industrial Complex case. We adopt Heckman’s approach to control selection bias, and use primary data from questionnaire surveys conducted at both firm and employee levels. We find that conventional firm-specific factors, such as wages, fringe benefits, and weekly work hours, primarily explain the labor market bias, but imperfect information is also positively associated with the bias. For example, a firm’s inadequate ability to identify a pool of potential employee candidates or to provide them comprehensive firm- or job-specific information tends to worsen labor shortages, and an employee’s ex-ante incomplete knowledge of on-the-job training or education opportunities tends to increase ex-post turnover intentions. Our results suggest that reducing the market bias requires improving imperfect information as well as conventional firm-specific conditions.     

International briefing 16: training and development in the Republic of Ireland

This paper explores the landscape of training and development in the Republic of Ireland, a country with an impressive economic record in recent years. Both the Irish economic context and business context are explored. The national system for training and development and the surrounding policy and strategy context are set down. Survey data are drawn upon to examine the nature of training and development at organizational level. Here influence on training and development, levels of expenditure, the number of days per employee category and the dominant methods employed training and development are all discussed. Finally the academic study of training and development in the Republic of Ireland is examined.