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Benefiting from economic crisis? Strategic orientation effects, trade-offs, and configurations with resource availability on SME performance

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Abstract

While there is growing interest in exploring strategic orientations, their interaction, and impact on firm performance, most research has been conducted within stable economic environments. Taking into consideration economic instability, it is timely to develop a more nuanced understanding of how economic crises may affect key strategic orientation prescriptions. In this research, we examine entrepreneurial and market orientations as means through which firms may operate within an economic crisis to seize available opportunities. Additionally, we consider how increasing financial resource availability during macro-economic constraint may affect these relationships. Based on a rare, and robust national random sample of 612 Russian small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) collected during a recent period of economic crisis in 2015–2016, our results reveal a positive effect of entrepreneurial orientation and a non-significant effect of market orientation. Moreover, we demonstrate how financial resource availability in concert with firms’ strategic orientations yields distinctly more, and less, productive configurations.

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Notes

  1. The Main State Registration Number of a Russian company is a 13-digit combination which consists of the following parts: the status of the state registration number, year of registration, constituent entity of Russian Federation, tax inspection code, record number, and control figure.

  2. SPARK Interfax database includes the information about all legal entities and individual entrepreneurs registered in Russia and uses constantly updated data from official government databases. The database allows finding information on any registered company, using a registration number, including OGRN, and provides detailed information about the company, such as its registration information, financial statements, description of activities, information on liabilities, decisions of arbitration courts, and other company information. http://www.spark-interfax.ru/promo/en/#_top.

  3. This figure indicates the number of validated (e.g., corresponding to the selection criteria) firms which were called by phone to participate in the survey. This figure includes all firms invited to participate via phone including those which accepted as well as those that declined. The approached firms called by phone were selected using equipment that enables the random selection of phone numbers from the total sampling frame (10,359).

  4. EO = entrepreneurial orientation; MO = market orientation; FC = financial capital availability; ɛ = error term.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Scott F. Latham for his generously sharing the survey instrument with the research team.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Management, St. Petersburg University, 3 Volkhovsky pereulok, St. Petersburg, 199004, Russia

    Tatiana Beliaeva & Galina Shirokova

  2. School of Business and Management, Lappeenranta University of Technology, P.O. Box 20, FI-53851, Lappeenranta, Finland

    Tatiana Beliaeva

  3. School of Economics and Management, Far Eastern Federal University, 8 Sukhanova, Vladivostok, 690091, Russia

    Galina Shirokova & Elena Gafforova

  4. School of Business, University at Albany-SUNY, 1400 Washington Ave, Albany, NY, 12222, USA

    William Wales

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  1. Tatiana Beliaeva
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Beliaeva, T., Shirokova, G., Wales, W. et al. Benefiting from economic crisis? Strategic orientation effects, trade-offs, and configurations with resource availability on SME performance. Int Entrep Manag J 16, 165–194 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-018-0499-2

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