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As the transition between exploration and exploitation is a unique challenge for SMEs, what mechanism(s) might facilitate this transition? Building on the entrepreneurship literature's entrepreneurial opportunity identification and development framework, this study hypothesizes that the novelty-centered business model (NCBM) may serve as such a mechanism.

Based on cross-sectional survey data collected from 169 Italian SMEs in various sectors, this study tests the mediation, moderation and moderated mediation relationships using the statistical PROCESS procedure.

Supporting the hypotheses that exploration and exploitation are positively associated within SMEs, that NCBM mediates this relationship and that the indirect relationship between exploration and exploitation by way of NCBM is stronger for SMEs with employees of medium to high creative human capital, the results suggest that SMEs can more effectively exploit new ideas identified in the exploration phase by developing an NCBM and accessing their creative human capital.

Although the robustness checks confirm the direction of the proposed hypotheses, given the cross-sectional nature of the dataset used, a longitudinal study would further validate the proposed framework.

SMEs can successfully achieve the transition between exploration and exploitation by reinventing their business model to compensate for their limited resources in terms of financial or relational capital. They can further enhance their ability to reinvent their business model and, in turn, to exploit innovations by hiring and retaining employees with greater creative human capital.

This study draws on the entrepreneurial opportunity, ambidexterity (exploration-exploitation) and business model literature to enhance our understanding of the role of the NCBM design concept (business model innovation) as a mechanism to achieve temporal ambidexterity in SMEs.

This paper aims to examine whether and how two firm-level factors jointly moderate the relation between corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and firm performance: (1) the “alignment” between a firm's CSR activities and risk preferences and (2) performance measurement systems (PMS).

Using survey responses from top managers of private Italian companies and matching archival data on the financial performance of these companies, the authors show that the positive effect of CSR activities on firm performance is contingent upon CSR–risk alignment, which creates competitive advantages, and the extent to which the firm's PMS are supportive of its strategic initiatives.

The findings suggest that to extract economic benefits from CSR activities, firms must align CSR activities with their risk preferences and rely on PMS to overcome the causal ambiguity between CSR activities and competitive advantage.

Overall, this study contributes to both the CSR–firm performance and consequences of PMS literature and holds significant practical implications.

The research study provides empirical insights on the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership (EL), entrepreneurial passion for founding (EPF), entrepreneurial bricolage (EB) and project success (PS), in the case of freelancers. The study aims to get a better understanding of whether freelancers, who behave like entrepreneurial leaders, can successfully complete projects through EB.

The study collected data from 209 freelancers through snowball sampling, in two waves, with a time-lag of fourteen days, to better examine the causality of variables. Data were analyzed by Model No. 4 and 7 (i.e. mediation and moderation, respectively) of Process macro.

Drawing on the effectuation theory, the results show that EB mediates the relationship between EL and PS and EPF moderates this relationship.

The freelancers can formally establish businesses later, after knowing whether they can complete these new types of projects. These online freelancing platforms can provide special services to freelancers who first want to test their skills on unrelated projects. In sum, the paper suggests that freelancers can be successful entrepreneurial leaders.

The EL, EPF, EB and PS are studied in the context of the informal sector, i.e. freelancing, which is the emerging working style in the world. It provides an in-depth understanding of phenomena in freelancers that lacks background literature.

Considering that context is important and relying on a contingency perspective, the purpose of the study is to analyze the relationship between an entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and firm performance in one of the world's oldest economies: Italy. The contingency perspective relies on competitive strategy as a moderating variable.

Using a mix of primary and secondary data sources, relationships are explored in a sample of 229 Italian for-profit firms. Moderated regression analysis is used for the sample and additional tests are conducted by firm size groupings.

The analysis suggests that an EO is positively associated with firm performance in the sample firms. Further, competitive strategy acts as a moderating influence: a low-cost strategy negatively influences the relationship, while a differentiation strategy positively influences the relationship. The firm size groupings do not appear to affect the results.

The study examines only for-profit firms in a single country, Italy; therefore, generalizability is limited. The results must be interpreted in light of these limitations.

This study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by considering a relatively new international context in the EO–firm performance relationship. Further, a new contingency perspective is advanced by considering competitive strategy. In doing so, this study extends an understanding of the conditions under which an EO might be associated with firm performance.

This study examines whether different strategy archetypes deploy specific performance metrics to support their strategic goals and priorities. If so, does alignment of strategy and metrics positively impact organisational performance?

The conceptual framework and hypotheses are couched in Contingency Theory. The role of business strategy as a moderating variable is tested using MANOVA, followed by post hoc pairwise comparisons. The results are based on cross-sectional survey data from 372 manufacturing and service organisations in Italy.

The overall contingency effect of business strategy in selecting and deploying performance metrics and their effect on organisational performance is supported. However, the group-wise post hoc analyses show support only for Prospectors but not for Defenders and Analysers.

This research lends further support in favour of the Contingency Theory from a new geographic context (Italy) that there are no universally best performance metrics that drive organisational performance. However, more research is needed to understand why the theory only holds for certain strategic archetypes and not across all archetypes.

Managers can direct resources and effort towards designing and deploying the “right” type of performance metrics suitable for their strategic orientation and thus optimise organisational performance.

This is a rare study that tests the moderating role of business strategy using all four strategic archetypes of the Miles and Snow typology. It deploys both financial and non-financial measures and uses a very large sample of both manufacturing and service organisations from a relatively unexplored region of the world. The study provides additional evidence in favour of the Contingency Theory whilst advocating for more research to refine our understanding of why the contingency perspective is not so important for firms that are not the first-in.

The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence regarding the relationship between the level of comprehensiveness of a performance measurement system (PMS) and its respective organizational effectiveness. The extant literature has highlighted that a PMS may successfully contribute to the implementation of the organizational strategy, with the balanced scorecard (BSC) serving as an exemplar of a strategy performance management tool and playing a primary role to this end. However, the reasons for the overall high rate of failure in the implementation of the BSC remain unexplained and, to date, little empirical research exists regarding the design of PMSs such as the BSC and its constituent elements.

Using a survey of 103 Italian managers, the paper advances a model describing a comprehensive BSC design, after identifying the key attributes from the performance management literature. Data were analyzed using cluster analysis and multiple regression analysis.

Results suggest that organizations are implementing the BSC following two different approaches, which vary from a less comprehensive to a more comprehensive design. More importantly, the BSC design explains variation across three organizational effectiveness measures: improvements in translating the organizational strategy into operational goals, understanding cause–effect relationships and enhancing internal communication among employees.

The paper builds on and extends the previous literature on performance management in two ways. First, via a literature review, it introduces a model describing a comprehensive BSC design, which includes 12 attributes. Second, it demonstrates that organizational effectiveness varies positively with the level of comprehensiveness of the BSC design.

This paper aims to advance the current debates on the effect of performance measurement (PM) in the operations management domain. In order to accomplish that, it investigates the contribution of business PM and human resource management (HRM) practices to business performance.

The paper is based on ten case studies conducted across both manufacturing and service organisations capturing evidence from both the human resource function and line management.

In the PM and HRM literatures, there is a debate about the contribution these practices make to the overall performance of the organisation. In particular, the results from the PM literature are inconclusive. This paper argues that performance is a result of employee engagement and that the PM system is a communication and guiding mechanism, which if implemented well and used appropriately, can channel the efforts of employees striving to perform.

This paper contradicts the performance drivers approach to PM by providing new insights into the roles PM and HRM practices play in delivering business performance. Additionally, the paper develops a set of propositions as a means of clearly stating the findings and for encouraging future research in this area.

This research focuses on the relationship between Top Management Team heterogeneity (TMT) and University Spin-Offs (USOs) economic performance according to a micro-foundational perspective. The purpose consists in exploring whether a high academic representation in TMTs may improve USOs’ performance and how their competencies and backgrounds affect USOs’ economic success.

The authors employed data from the Italian platform Netval to identify the entire population of USOs in southern Italy. They selected both pure and hybrid spin-offs that had at least one academic member on the TMT. Applying these conditions to our sample selection, the authors came to a population of 136 firms. They applied a hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

Our main findings reveal that the USOs’ economic performance improves with more academicians in the TMT and even in the same scientific field. Our data also shows that CEO duality has a negative impact on economic performance.

This work takes for the first time a micro-foundational perspective to analyze individual-level factors that affect USOs’ performance. The authors tried to bridge a research gap in the USO literature, shedding light on the relationship between TMT composition and new venture performance, considering some significant interactions between team members. Our expected findings also contribute to the general literature on entrepreneurial teams in new ventures and suggest a means to reconcile some inconsistent literature results on TMT heterogeneity and USO performance.

This paper aims to consider how and to what extent it is possible to interpret a performance management system (PMS) as a typical control mechanism or in a more innovative way as a learning tool. PMSs are typically used for planning and coordination purposes. However, they may also be used as an opportunity to foster learning inside the organization.

The empirical analysis was carried out during January-May 2014. A single case study was developed, in the first phase, through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with three top managers, to investigate the purpose and rationale of the design of the PMS. The investigation then continued with non-participant observation.

The picture shows the dominance of “command and control” thinking, based on a cybernetic control system connected to targets and linking the achievement of these targets to individual performance.

This paper helps to contextualize reflections on PMSs and potential learning outcomes in knowledge organizations, with specific reference to the airport industry.

This paper contributes to the extant debate on the relationship between PMSs and learning. Traditionally, the literature has focused only on particular aspects of PMSs. Other authors, relying on a contingent approach, have instead put forward the need of a more comprehensive and integrated frameworks encompassing organic conception of PMSs, as well as of the interdependencies among their components. In the case study under scrutiny in this paper, adaptive or single-loop learning is taking place, in which adaptive changes occur but do not lead to any major changes.

This study aims to explore the extent to which companies rely on sustainability management control systems (SMCS) to translate corporate social responsibility (CSR) into superior performance building upon the premise of the natural resource orchestration perspective.

Data were collected based on a survey data set from 118 Chief Financial Officers of publicly listed companies in Iran. The theoretical model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM, SmartPLS 3.0) as a method that enjoys minimum demands concerning normality assumptions and sample size.

The findings support the full mediation effect of SMCS on the relationship between CSR and organizational performance. This implies that CSR affects performance only through the mediating role of SMCS.

The central premise in the proposed theoretical framework is that the utilization of proper management control mechanisms (i.e. SMCS) can help the organization to better synchronize, measure and manage – i.e. “orchestrate” – the social, environmental and economic impacts, and this, in turn, leads to improved organizational performance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study of its kind, building on a unique synthesis of the agency cost perspective and resource orchestration theory, to introduce the “natural resource orchestration” approach for examining the intervening role of SMCS between CSR and organizational performance.