Arriving at the high-growth firm

This study explores heterogeneity in how firms have achieved high growth. Using the population of all firms in Sweden with more than 20 employees in existence in 1996 (N=11,748), we analyzed their development for each year of the previous 10 years (1987 to 1996). From this population of all firms in Sweden, multiple criteria were used to define a sample of high-growth firms (n=1501). Using 19 different measures of firm growth (such as relative and absolute sales growth, relative and absolute employee growth, organic growth vs. acquisition growth, and the regularity and volatility of growth rates over the 10-year period), we identified seven different types of firm growth patterns. These patterns were related to firm age and size as well as industry affiliation. Implications for research and practice are offered.     

International Opportunity Recognition among Small and Medium‐Sized Family Firms*

Current research in the field of entrepreneurship emphasizes the importance of opportunity recognition as a key element in the entrepreneurial process. It has been recognized that network ties, activeness and alertness, and prior knowledge are related to how entrepreneurs recognize new opportunities. However, it is unclear how important these factors are when a firm explores opportunities for entry into a foreign market. In this exploratory case study, covering the international opportunity recognition of eight family‐owned small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), we found that the firms in question mainly recognized international opportunities by establishing new formal ties rather than using existing informal or family ties. The findings also indicated that due to the small size and the flexibility of the management team in family SMEs, these firms were able to react quickly to new international opportunities. However, there was no direct relationship between the prior knowledge of the firms and their international opportunity recognition. In addition, we found that trade exhibitions formed the primary context for the international opportunity recognition of the SMEs in this study. These findings motivate a set of five propositions that may lead to further studies on this topic.     

Formal Development Opportunities and Withdrawal Behaviors by Employees in Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises

This study explores direct and indirect relationships between involvement in formal training and development events, employee attitudes and withdrawal responses including turnover intentions and neglectful behavior for those employed in small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). Questionnaire data were obtained from 185 staff employed in a diverse range of SMEs. Our results suggest that employees that participate in more training and development events are less likely to be considering leaving their employer and less likely to engage in neglectful behavior. However, the analysis revealed that the effects of participation in formal training and development are fully mediated by perceptions of organizational support and job satisfaction. In contrast to results from studies in large organizations, affective commitment was not found to be an influential determinant of employee exit intentions or neglect.     

Ties that Bind? A Mediation Analysis Exploring Contract Use in Family versus Nonfamily Firms

Based on the assumptions of agency theory, family business researchers have often argued that family firms are less likely to use formal methods of monitoring and control than nonfamily firms. We explore the relationship between family firm status and presence of a written agreement among the owners, a formal measure of control. We hypothesize economic goals and perceived level of risk taking and management efficacy will mediate the relationship between family firm status and presence of a written agreement. Results indicate that the primary goal of the firm serves as a partial mediator of this relationship.     

Firm Growth in Family Businesses—The Role of Entrepreneurial Orientation and the Entrepreneurial Activity

Previous studies show that growth is an important goal for businesses, but little is known of how the entrepreneurial orientation–performance relationship works in family businesses and how this differs from their nonfamily peers. We examine that and how entrepreneurial activity mediates the relationship in family and nonfamily businesses. Our results on 532 firms show that family businesses benefit from innovative orientation, which is both directly and indirectly associated with firm growth via entrepreneurial activity. This association does not exist in nonfamily businesses. Furthermore, risk taking does not influence family business growth even if it does in nonfamily businesses.     

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.     

Disentangling the effects of organizational capabilities, innovation and firm size on SME sales growth

This paper focuses on certain drivers of SME sales growth related to knowledge and innovation. Building on the dynamic capabilities literature, we test whether two organizational capabilities (external sourcing and employee involvement in renewal activities) predict sales growth, and if so, whether such effects are mediated by process and/or product innovation. Based on survey data from a panel study of Dutch SMEs, and controlling for several firm characteristics (firm size, sector, age and family business), we conclude that external sourcing has direct effects on both product and process innovation, with an indirect effect (mediated by process innovation) on sales growth. In line with our hypothesis development, we also find that employee involvement, while positively affecting process innovation, has a negative effect on sales growth. Firm size moderates the effects of two of the variables (external sourcing and product innovation) on sales growth, with more positive effects found for the smallest firms, results supporting the nimbleness (versus resource-based) view.     

Corporate social responsibility disclosure and market value: Family versus nonfamily firms

We investigate the moderating role of family involvement in the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting and firm market value using a longitudinal archival data set in the French context. Our empirical results show that family firms report less information on their CSR duties than do nonfamily firms. However, market-based financial performance, as measured by Tobin's q, is positively related to CSR disclosure for family firms and negatively related to CSR disclosure for nonfamily firms. Family firms would benefit greatly from communicating commitment to CSR; specifically, they could obtain shareholders' endorsement more easily than nonfamily firms could.     

Selective Engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility: A Stakeholder Perspective

This paper attempts to understand selective engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR involves various issues that can meet demands from multiple stakeholders. A firm can focus on certain CSR issues to satisfy a particular stakeholder while ignoring the demands from other stakeholders, or it can take a more balanced approach to CSR by addressing a wider range of social issues. In this paper, I investigate how stakeholder pressures from three types of primary stakeholders (customer, supplier, and employee) shape selective engagement in CSR. The empirical results based on a representative sample of more than 1,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the early 2000s suggest that firms prioritize their stakeholders based on instrumental considerations. Those stakeholders who have greater power over the focal firm will exert a larger impact on a firm’s CSR engagement. Constrained by limited managerial resources, firms accord attention to a limited range of issues most relevant to salient stakeholders. Specifically, MNCs as major customers pressure the focal firm to assume more responsibility for product quality, as well as on a wider range of social issues; SOEs as both major customers and major suppliers pressure the focal firm to assume more responsibility for employee welfare; employees with higher education pressure the focal firm to assume more responsibility for employee welfare, and for a wider range of social issues. This study contributes to stakeholder theory and research on the CSR of SMEs, and has important implications for CSR practitioners.     

Board of directors and export spillovers: What is the impact on extensive margins of trade?

Increased export experience on the board of nonexporting firms has a causal effect on their propensity to enter foreign markets in later periods. Using a universal set of Swedish employer–employee panel data for the period 2000–14, this paper finds evidence on spillover from exporters to non-exporting SMEs through outside board directors. The identification strategy to account for endogenous selection of external board members relies on external instruments and applications of different instrumental variable approaches, capturing also unobserved heterogeneity. Our findings are robust to controlling for export background among managers and employees, as well as firm size, human capital, total factor productivity, productivity spillovers, firm location and industry classification.     

Founding Family Firms,CEO Incentive Pay,and Dual Agency Problems

This paper contributes to the literature on agency theory by examining relations between family involvement and CEO compensation. Using a panel of 362 small U.S. listed firms, we analyze how founding families influence firm performance through option portfolio price sensitivity. Consistent with the dual agency framework, we find that family firms have lower CEO incentive pay, which is further reduced by higher executive ownership. Interestingly, such incentive pay offsets the positive impact that families have on firm valuation. Collectively, our results show that, compared with nonfamily firms, lower incentive pay adopted by family firms due to lower agency costs mitigates the direct effect of family involvement on firm performance. Once accounting for CEO incentive pay, we do not observe performance differences between family and nonfamily firms.     

Family control,accounting misstatements,and market reactions to restatements: Evidence from China

We examine the impact of family control on the likelihood of accounting misstatements and on market reactions to subsequent restatements. Using a matched-firm approach, we find that family control overall reduces the incidence of misstatements, consistent with the notion that controlling families have a greater concern for reputation than nonfamily blockholders. However, compared to nonfamily firm restatements, restatements announced by family-controlled firms trigger significantly more negative market reactions. We attribute the more negative market reactions to the greater loss in reputation and higher investor scepticism of the credibility of corporate insiders for family firms than for nonfamily firms following restatements.     

Is blood always thicker than water? Family firm parents,kinship ties,and the survival of spawns

We theorize that due to their ability to draw upon the distinctive bonding and bridging social capital resources of their family firm parents, family member spawns have longer early survival times than nonfamily member spawns from family firms, which in turn should have longer early survival times than spawns from nonfamily firm parents. We also predict that the survival enhancing effects of family parent bonding and bridging social capital are conditional on the spatial, cognitive and social proximity between the parent and the spawn. Using a population wide sample of 114,837 spawns founded in Sweden between 2000 and 2007, we find that nonfamily member spawns survive longer than spawns from nonfamily firms, and that this survival enhancing effect is contingent on the spatial and social proximity between the spawn and its parent. We also find that spawns founded by family members, on average, do not survive longer than spawns from family firms founded by nonfamily members, and that greater spatial and cognitive distance even hurt the survival of family member spawns. We discuss the contributions of our research to the spawning, family firm, and entrepreneurship literatures.     

Local formal interpersonal networks and SMEs internationalisation: Empirical evidence from the UK

This article uses data from the UK Longitudinal Small Business Survey (2015) to empirically test the relationship between local (formal and informal) interpersonal networks and exporting. Our results suggest that local interpersonal networks increase the likelihood of exporting. More importantly, we find that the role of formal interpersonal networks (e.g. accountants) on internationalisation increases as firm size increases, while the link between informal interpersonal networks (e.g. family) and exporting becomes weaker. We argue that larger firms have more complex operations and diverse structures than smaller firms that require the engagement of formal interpersonal networks to help with the internationalisation process.     

Public Credit Guarantee Schemes and SMEs’ Profitability: Evidence from Italy

The aim of this study is to assess the effectiveness of the Italian State Credit Guarantee Scheme (Central Guarantee Fund). The paper analyzes the impact of the program on SMEs’ profitability considering the firm size and sector. The analysis is performed using propensity‐score matching estimators and the Difference in Differences regressions on a proprietary sample of about 38,000 SMEs in the period 2007–2009. Overall, the Central Guarantee Fund generated an increase in the profitability of guaranteed firms during the period of economic downturn. However, significant differences emerged across firms by size and sector. The effect is positive and robust only for micro‐ and small‐sized firms, and the most relevant improvement in the profitability is recorded for firms operating in the manufacturing sector. This implies that more customized programs are necessary to reach a higher value for money in entrepreneurial policies.     

Formal vs. Informal CSR Strategies: Evidence from Italian Micro, Small, Medium-sized, and Large Firms

Recent research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) suggests the need for further exploration into the relationship between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and CSR. SMEs rarely use the language of CSR to describe their activities, but informal CSR strategies play a large part in them. The goal of this article is to investigate whether differences exist between the formal and informal CSR strategies through which firms manage relations with and the claims of their stakeholders. In this context, formal CSR strategies seem to characterize large firms while informal CSR strategies prevail among micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises. We use a sample of 3,626 Italian firms to investigate our research questions. Based on a multi-stakeholder framework, the analysis provides evidence that small businesses’ use of CSR, involving strategies with an important impact on the bottom line, reflects an attempt to secure their license to operate in the communities; while large firms rarely make attempts to integrate their CSR strategies into explicit management systems.     

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.     

The impact of informal social interaction on innovation capability in the context of buyer-supplier dyads

Although many studies employ social network theory to explain firm innovation, how individual-level factors lead to a firm's collective innovation capability remains under-researched. Building on studies that use the work boundary to define formal and informal social interactions, this research aims to illuminate how informal buyer-supplier employee interactions influence buyer firms' innovation capabilities through knowledge acquisition. Integrating the literatures on absorptive capacity and social interaction, the analysis of survey data from 273 Chinese manufacturing firms suggests that employees' informal interactions are positively associated with knowledge acquisition and enhance firms' innovation capabilities. Furthermore, the indirect effects of informal interactions on innovation capability are moderated by knowledge application.