Search results

This paper investigates the effect of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) on small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) access to credit. Starting with the idea that SMEs' strategy-making process, structures and behaviour can favour credit access, the authors also explore the moderating role of bank lending technologies in shaping this relationship.

This study relies on a unique survey of Austrian and Italian SMEs which contains detailed information on access to credit, EO dimensions, relationship lending and firm-level characteristics. The authors perform stepwise logistic regressions to assess whether EO interacts with SME's access to finance, and how relationship lending enhances this relationship.

Proactiveness, autonomy and competitive aggressiveness are important constructs for improving access to bank financing. Those dimensions became more important when a relationship bank is involved, suggesting a role for relationship lending in overcoming SMEs' opaqueness. In addition, relationship lending is crucial for innovative SMEs in overcoming credit denial rates.

The small sample did not allow to analyse the effect of EO on discouraged borrowers. Furthermore, alternative measures of relationship lending (such as geographical proximity or the length of the relationship) and the share of credit granted by the relationship bank would have been interesting to further validate our results.

This study shows that EO dimensions and the type of lending technology are relevant for the financial success of SMEs. More precisely, the authors show that diversity within the banking system helps innovative, autonomous, proactive and competitive SMEs. These important pieces of soft information are injected into the final lending decision when a relationship bank is involved. The evidence suggests the need for SMEs to interact with local banks to fully exploit their EO posture.

To the authors' knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to analyse whether relationship lending can affect the EO–credit access relation.

This study aims to investigate whether social capital mediates the impact of financial capital on business performance in Cameroon.

The study uses quantitative data collected from 370 small businesses in Yaoundé and Douala in Cameroon. All businesses in the sample are formally registered and are in the services sector. A structural equation modelling (SEM) approach is used for the analysis.

Structural and relational capital constraints are significant mediators of formal and informal finance. The magnitude effects of relational capital are the largest, underlining information's importance in resolving small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs') financial constraints. In addition, the effect of informal finance constraints on business performance is larger in magnitude, confirming the substantial impact of informal finance on SME operations.

The paper confirms that relational and structural social capital are vital in business. However, the study did not investigate the disaggregated effects of these dimensions of social capital. Furthermore, how SMEs transition between formal and informal finance could provide further understanding of the role of social capital. A disaggregated and panel data set would help to provide additional insights.

Social capital emerges as a pivotal factor in enhancing SME access to finance. The results, therefore, confirm the relevance of a holistic approach to easing financial capital constraints for SMEs and enabling small businesses to connect more to various stakeholders to amplify business performance. In addition, the findings identified some intervention points for the governments in Cameroon as it seeks to use SMEs as its pivot for development and to catapult itself to emerging economy status in its Cameroon 2035 vision.

The value of the study lies in assessing the mediating effect of cognitive, relational and structural social capital constraints on business performance and comparing the effect of formal and informal financial constraints on business performance.

This paper aims to investigate bank credit policies and uncover yacht building finance assessment factors from bank credit policies toward the yacht industry.

This study’s questionnaire attempts to identify survey respondents’ degrees of awareness through difference analysis, and then uses entropy weighting and gray relational analysis to discover priority ranking order of bank credit assessment considerations from the perspective of Taiwan’s banking sector.

The research findings show that yacht builders have to review their ship financing application methods and improve shortcomings to meet banks’ credit granting requirements.

Banks emphasize yacht builders’ repayment ability to protect their depositors and shareholders.

Global crises have become increasingly recurrent events that jeopardize public-private partnerships (PPPs). In this context, the purpose of this paper is to expose the PPP-crisis research agenda by combining bibliometric and network analyses.

The PPP literature associated with global crises between the 2008 global financial crisis and 2022 was analyzed in three stages: (1) paper selection and screening for the inclusion/exclusion of articles relevant to this research, (2) semantic network development for examining thematic relationships among selected papers by considering the co-occurrence of keywords within the chosen studies and (3) calculation of network metrics for analysis.

The paper identified six research avenues for the PPP-crisis agenda: public interest, relational governance, risk management, user-pay PPPs, crisis management and financial performance. The PPP-crisis literature has spread significantly in the last five years driven by the case study approaches on a national or regional basis. Conversely, non-crisis periods generate room to strengthen user-pay PPPs and relational governance. The pandemic and post-pandemic times shared the priorities of the 2008 financial crisis but also strengthened the management of the risks and the structural drivers of the global crisis.

This study demonstrates that during global crisis periods, the public interest and financial performance gain relevance in a detriment of structural solutions to social legitimacy erosion of PPPs because of the urgency of giving tools to the public and private sectors to tackle the financial issues, which steer future issues for PPPs.

This study aims to determine the status and conditions of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as predictors in empowering the rural communities of Samar Island, Philippines. Specifically, it aimed to describe SMEs’ organizational variables, and assess their conditions in terms of membership/ownership structure; leadership; policies, systems and procedures; resource mobilization; linkages and networking; communication systems; and awards and recognition; determine the level of empowerment of rural communities with SMEs along the aspects of material, perceptual and relational changes; and find out whether significant relationship exist between the organizational variables and the level of empowerment.

The study is a descriptive survey that utilized structured survey questionnaires, personal interviews and dialogues with the respondents in the actual data collection. The survey involved 18 SMEs from the rural communities of the 12 municipalities from the 3 provinces of Samar Island, as study samples – 6 coming from each province with 2 SMEs in every sub-sector of trading, manufacturing and services. Out of 270 respondents, 256 (94.81 per cent) responded. All statistics were computed using the SPSS computer software.

The organizational variables of the SMEs such as membership and ownership structure, leadership, policies, systems and procedures, resource mobilization, linkages and networking, communication systems and awards and recognition were assessed to be all “good” and were found to have significant relationship with the level of empowerment of rural communities with SMEs.

The rural communities with SMEs were empowered along the aspects of material, perceptual and relational changes. The result of the study indicated that through SMEs, rural people experienced changes in their lives. The test about the relationship of the organizational variables such as nature and ownership of business enterprise, leadership, policies, systems and procedures, resource mobilization, linkages and networking, communication systems and awards and recognition and the level of empowerment of rural communities as determined by changes in the material, perceptual and relational aspects of rural life proved to have significant relationships.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the concept of vicarious moral cleansing and scrutinize whether unethical behavior of leaders initiate moral cleansing in subordinates or not. This study also highlights a boundary condition under which employees are motivated to cleanse their moral self-image through increased organizational citizenship behaviors and decreased counterproductive work behaviors.

The study is quantitative based on hypothesis testing. By adopting convenience sampling technique, employees working at all managerial levels of service sector organizations were asked to fill out the questionnaires. Being a time-lagged study, data for independent variable (unethical leadership) and moderator (relational self-construal) were collected at T1, data for mediator (moral self-image) were collected at T2 and data for outcomes (OCBs, CWBs) were collected at T3 from same respondents. To rule out the possibility of common method bias and social desirability bias, a multi-wave design was adopted and respondents were asked to provide unique keys/IDs instead of their names.

This study investigated the impact that unethical leaders impose on employee self-concept. Moreover, this study also explored the motivational tendencies of moral self-image. Findings suggest that employees' desirable or undesirable behaviors against leader are dependent upon the perceptions related with their own role, self-image and perception of leader's integrity and intentions. Leader's unethicality is perceived threatening for their own moral self-image and they deal with it constructively. This study has laid the foundation for presence of vicarious moral cleansing in organizational setup, and it is advised that researchers must investigate this phenomenon in different settings to provide useful insights.

Due to lack of resources, employing a pure longitudinal research design was not feasible, and therefore a time-lagged research design was used to gather data from only two cities of Pakistan. However, authors believe that a longitudinal research design, with data collection from a larger sample, will provide more fine-grained results. Secondly, use of perceived leader's integrity scale to measure unethical leadership is another limitation. Although the authors tried to address this issue by conducting an EFA and adopting only suitable items, yet a new scale which is able to measure the true essence of unethical leadership ought to be developed.

Use of moral self-image as an indicator of moral cleansing is an additional contribution of this study, as previous studies used levels of guilt as driving force behind moral cleansing and compensatory cleansing. Most of the studies on unethical leadership as well as moral cleansing took place in the Western context and scholars' stress that culture can substantially influence outcomes of these constructs. Thus, this study extends the literature on moral cleansing and moral self-regulation by developing and testing a model in cultural settings of Pakistan.

本研究擬探討間接感受到的道德清洗 (以下簡稱間接道德清洗) 這個概念；研究亦會仔細審視領袖的不道德行為會否在其下屬間引起道德清洗。就此而言，本研究亦強調了一個邊界條件，在這邊界條件之下，僱員透過組織公民行為的增加，以及為工作目標帶來負面影響的工作行為的減少得到激勵，進而淨化他們的道德自我形象。

本研究為一個基於假設檢定的量性研究；研究採用任意抽樣方法而進行。在服務業機構內不同管理階層工作的僱員被邀回答問卷；由於這是一個時滯研究，即使是同一的答覆者，IV (不道德的領導) 和仲裁人(關係型自我建構)的數據在T1收集，調解員 (道德自我形象) 的數據在T2收集，結果 (OCBs，CWBs) 的數據在T3收集，為了排除共同方法偏差和社會期許誤差的出現，研究採用多波浪設計，而且，答覆者必須提供獨一無二的密鑰或身份證明，而不是提供他們的名字。

本研究探討了不道德的領袖對僱員自我概念的影響；研究亦探索了可能推動道德自我形象的因素。研究結果暗示、僱員會做對領袖而言可取的行為與否，全視乎他們如何看待自己的角色和自我形象，也視乎他們對領袖的誠信和動機有甚麼看法。領袖若不道德，這會被認為會對僱員的道德自我形象做成威脅，在這情況下，僱員會積極地應付這個威脅。本研究為在組織架構內存有間接道德清洗這個觀點打下基礎。今後的研究學者或許應就不同的環境、對這個現象進行探討和研究，以使我們能更深刻地瞭解這個課題。

從前的研究均採用內疚的程度、作為道德清洗和補償清洗背後的推動力 (Liao et al., 2018) 。本研究另外的貢獻在於採用了道德自我形象、作為道德清洗的指標。以前關於不道德領導以及道德清洗的研究，大多以西方國家為背景。研究學者均強調文化因素會很大程度地影響這些觀念帶來的結果；因此，本研究透過設計一個以巴基斯坦文化為背景的模型、並對其進行測試、來擴展有關道德清洗及道德自我調節的文獻。

To enhance the loan repayment performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Pakistan, this study aims to analyze the direct impact of social capital and loan credit terms on loan repayment performance and microenterprises’ business performance while considering the mediating role of microenterprises’ business performance on the relationship between social capital, loan credit terms and loan repayment performance.

The analysis was conducted based on the data gathered via a questionnaire distributed to 316 microenterprises owners. The respondents were selected using the stratified sampling technique by dividing the target population into three influential groups of manufacturing, trading and services microenterprises. The reliability and validity of the constructs were established using (1) factor loading, (2) Cronbach’s alpha, (3) composite reliability, (4) average variance extracted, (5) the variance inflation factor, (6) the Fornell–Larcker criterion and (7) the heterotrait–monotrait ratio. The structural equation modeling technique was then applied, and the hypotheses were tested based on the structure model generated through bootstrapping by using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results confirm the direct impact of social capital and loan credit terms on microenterprises’ business performance and loan repayment performance. It also supports the mediating role of microenterprises’ business performance toward the relationship between social capital, loan credit terms and loan repayment performance while considering the direct impact of microenterprises’ business performance on loan repayment performance.

To date, the direct impact of social capital and loan credit terms on microenterprises’ business performance and loan repayment performance has been hardly investigated in the context of Pakistan. This study also examines the mediating role of microenterprises’ business performance toward social capital, loan credit terms and loan repayment performance. The findings will enable both MFIs and microenterprises to improve their business performance and loan repayment performance through enhanced social ties and the development of more flexible credit products that protect the borrowers’ interests and the interest of lenders.