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Employee work adjustment (EWA) represents the ability of individuals to adjust effectively to working conditions, supervisors, the environment and their peers. To deal with work adjustment in different environments, companies need to both understand and continually assess their employees. The purpose of this paper is to develop an instrument to measure EWA for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Thailand.

The study was conducted in three stages to develop a measurement scale for EWA. First, 18 questions were developed as a questionnaire based on concepts and theories of EWA and validated using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) into four dimensions such as work, supervisor, environment and peer adjustments. Then, a survey was conducted for 360 new employees in SMEs. Finally, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and convergent validity were tested along the four adjustment dimensions.

This research extended and broadened the EWA concept to provide theoretical support for the adjustment of intelligence research. Four dimensions were developed to measure EWA including aspects of work, supervisor, environment and peer.

The EWA model was examined using EFA and CFA only. Questionnaire results suggested that concrete constructs were stronger because of single-source, self-assessed data collection as the sample included only employees of SMEs in high-growth sectors of Thailand. EWA findings exhibited a good fit but results require further future refinement and validation using a larger sample size and sampling area.

The EWA questionnaire has practical use regarding management behaviour and can assist companies and practitioners to better understand the required adjustments for new employees at start-up. This knowledge will help managers to encourage and support newcomers to work better and deliver effective results. Managers and practitioners can develop and hone work adjustment practices for new recruits according to the four dimensions proposed here.

The validity of this EWA questionnaire will facilitate the future study on boundaries with EWA measurements spanning SMEs contexts. Empirical research results verified that EWA assessment offered new perspectives to explore vital individual work adjustments that are necessary for new recruits to succeed. This instrumental support will help researchers to effectively understand EWA and explore its potential in future studies.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how the relationship of gifts/counter-gifts between actors enables us to build an HRM policy that we call “shared and ethical”. It is shared because it is co-constructed by both owner-manager and employees, and ethical because it is deemed desirable by the players and meets their expectations. This approach aims to make HRM more responsible in view of the commitments made by stakeholders.

Drawing upon the Maussian theory of gift/counter-gift, a longitudinal and retrospective study was conducted over a period of three years with a French SME.

The authors highlight two key stages in the gift process: the initial gift of the owner-manager, which is reflected in the establishment of a social pact, and the gap in perception between employees’ contribution and the counter-gift expected of the owner-manager. The authors show the complexity of the gift-chain by building a shared and ethical HRM and highlight the tensions identified between the existence of tools and mutual adjustments in HRM through gifts and counter-gifts.

Usual HRM in SMEs is centred on the owner-manager. On the contrary this research highlights how an SME can develop an alternative HRM. A longitudinal and retrospective study, carried out with a French SME, led to the construction of a process modelling of a shared HRM ethics.

There can be no doubt that the small and medium sized enterprise (SME) plays a pivotal role in most if not all economies, and that social policy makers have an interest in ensuring the viability of this sector of the economy, which plays a crucial role in the contract culture of national and international competitiveness. Quite apart from the essential symbiosis between the large multinationals and public limited companies and this sector, the sustainability of unemployment benefit payouts would be jeopardised should the sector experience a significant downturn. There are already worldwide concerns about the ability to continue to finance state pensions at anything like the present scale, and any loss of viability of the SME sector will simply exacerbate this situation. There are also useful reciprocations to be achieved by comparisons across sectors, including in significant areas such as internal control (Vinten, Lane, Hayes, 1996). The recent flurry of activity has included initiatives of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales 1996) and the information needs of owners (Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales 1996a), an Auditing Practices Board (1996) Practice Note, and a Department of Trade and Industry Consultation Document (DTI 1996).

Innovation is ever more critical for sustainable business performance in the contemporary, global economic and social context. Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are arguably well positioned to innovate through their potential for rapid adjustment. Although leadership and organizational climate have been identified as playing a key role in innovation, little is known about whether such influences play out in SMEs. The aim of this study is to explore how leaders shape the organizational climate of their firms to enhance innovation.

The article presents findings from semi-structured interviews conducted with 20 CEOs of SMEs in the Vietnamese tourism sector.

The findings indicate that SME leaders in the tourism sector influenced an organizational climate that provided for autonomy and supported innovation through a number of leadership approaches. They also used daily interaction-based practices to drive the innovative behaviors of employees and developed reward systems to encourage innovation in their organizations.

This study explored leaders' approaches toward developing an organizational climate to stimulate innovation in tourism SMEs. Where leaders share frequent communication and knowledge with their subordinates, they perceive a climate for innovation developments, which stimulates innovation in tourism SMEs.

The study provides implications for managers to improve creativity and innovation in firms through the development of reward and incentive systems along with leadership and team development programs.

This study describes how different leader approaches affect innovation through orientating the organizational climate and business processes within their firms toward encouraging staff to initiate and try out new ideas.

Many FDI studies focus on the advantages that businesses can gain through internationalization and internalization. More recent research has indicated that such traditional theories or perspectives may not sufficiently explain the subsequent success or failure of a firm’s operation in a foreign country, because the advantages gained through FDIs could be greatly affected by their strategic management in the host country environment. This study focused on the issue of a firm’s resources on its subsidiary’s competitiveness in a foreign country. A survey was undertaken in China. All companies participating in the study were small and medium‐sized Singapore‐China joint ventures and Singaporean wholly owned enterprises in China. The findings indicated that the variance in a firm’s performance in a foreign country can be largely explained by the six dimensions of firm resources: (1) technological resources, (2) owner/top manager’s managerial skills and capabilities, (3) employee’s Guanxi skills, (4) employee’s professional/technical knowledge, (5) the firm’s internal relationships and, (6) the firm’s external relationships. Among these six dimensions, employees’ professional knowledge and Guanxi skills, as well as a firm’s internal and external relationships, are significant predictors of Singaporean SMEs’ success in China.

Business process reengineering (BPR) has been widely applied in many enterprises. However, most cases have targeted large enterprises. In Taiwan, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which account for at least 95 per cent of all enterprises, have played an extremely important role in Taiwan’s economic growth. The question of whether those SMEs can successfully implement BPR in order to strengthen their management structure is an important issue. Undertakes a detailed case study of an SME whose profits had fallen dramatically and which successfully implemented organizational restructuring (OR). Discovers that, although the SME in question did not make use of information technology to achieve the goal of organizational restructuring, by adopting use of BPR concepts and methods it achieved its goal of transformation. The model used for the implementation procedure of OR should provide a useful reference for other SMEs in Taiwan seeking to achieve perpetual operation, because most SMEs will eventually encounter similar problems.

The ongoing coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in sudden changes in the macro environment and market behaviour, making most enterprises urgently reconfigure their business models to cope with changes following the COVID-19 outbreak. This paper aims to present empirical data on the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), highlighting the initial conclusions regarding their crisis management. It presents factual data on how SMEs in Jordan can use entrepreneurship to combat uncertainty and promote new opportunities.

This study involves an exploratory qualitative research design, drawing from 32 semi-structured interviews of key informants from Jordanian SMEs in different stages of the crisis. The different coping strategies of the SMEs and their effectiveness in the first six months of the pandemic are then compared.

The findings show how Jordanian SMEs have adapted to cope with the changes in the business environment because of COVID-19. These strategies include modifying their operations that is moving from an ordinary business model to more tentative digitalisation, improving internal communication and restructuring ad hoc organisational culture.

The study presents important and timely implications for managers of Jordanian SMEs and policymakers by increasing the sensitisation and awareness of SMEs’ coping mechanisms. It is the first study in management that empirically analyses the impact of COVID-19 on Jordanian SMEs.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the evolving perceptions and human resource (HR) responses of owners and HR managers of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) towards local labour markets in the context of the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

This study adopts a two-stage longitudinal qualitative approach involving 52 interviews with owners and HR managers of Chinese SMEs in the pre- and post-pandemic time periods.

The findings reveal a shift from the perceptions of a general labour shortage to perceptions of specialised talent shortages and increasing geographical disparities in local labour markets. They further reveal that SMEs are increasingly likely to adopt efficiency-oriented, flexibility-enhancing HR practices in the face of high uncertainty.

The findings provide insights into the nature of the constraints of SMEs' sustainable development that need to be addressed by policymakers, SME owners and HR managers when they devise and implement policies relating to structure optimisation, labour market integration and mobility enhancement.

In contrast to extant literature that has examined the labour market at the national level, this study explores the views of SMEs (the demand side) by taking a localised perspective on how SMEs have responded to change through their HR practices.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how small and medium enterprises (SMEs) cope with the need for labour flexibility. Most previous studies ignore the labour flexibility practices of SMEs, especially in times of economic growth and tight labour markets.

A multiple case study approach is applied, with ten Dutch SMEs located in one small province with a similar labour market. A survey was executed as an intake, followed by 48 interviews with the entrepreneurs, HR and other managers and employees, and two focus groups in each company. The findings are based on an analysis of the approved case descriptions.

SMEs, like big companies, do not rely on one flexibility practice. Volume fluctuations are countered with all flexibility strategies, the mix fluctuations and the product innovations are mostly countered with flexible functions and flexible production technology. In general, the data suggest that flexibility strategies of SMEs can be characterised as ad hoc, reactive and with a short-term orientation.

Future research should include other sectors and regions enabling to generalise the findings. Future research should have a longitudinal design to include the pathway dependencies of flexibility practices.

This study identifies the need to analyse flexibility demands; reduce flexibility demands before investments in flexibility practices; create production process flexibility; invest in labour flexibility practices only after the first three steps are taken; and develop basic and more advanced levels of flexible contracts, flexible functions and flexible working times.

This study contributes to the authors’ knowledge on the use of labour flexibility practices in SMEs. In addition, it brings empirical data on how these labour flexibility practices relate to the needs for flexibility and how they relate to other sources of organisational flexibility, such as a flexible market approach and flexible production technologies. Dynamic capabilities should include the suggested operationalisation of the flexibility practices.

This multiple case study research aims to identify the characteristics of scaling up SMEs in Chile for exploring how and why some entrepreneurship in the information technology (IT) sector are able to scale up and develop sustainable strategies, based on three consecutive years. The average sales of the companies during the last period analysed was around US$1,323,579, with an average annual growth rate of 66.7%. Scaling up SMEs may require several attributes to achieve positive revenue and develop effective high growth rates that allow them to succeed over several years.

To discern the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, the methodology of multiple case study research was conducted in three parts. The first was to define and design the research process, in which the study should settle the theory analysis and then show that research propositions and questions. The second part of the research was to prepare, collect and analyse the data through crafting instruments and data collection protocols as a source of evidence to conduct the pilot and multiple case study. In this stage, interviews were scheduled, transcribed, analysed and coded to explore how individual attributes may create a scaling-up entrepreneurial process for maintaining or developing high performance in the IT sector. The last part of the research concludes and validates the research propositions for the identification for potential attributes, which were obtained during the qualitative study.

Attributes were selected when 13 or more SMEs reported the importance of this initiative for the process of scaling up their SMEs. As a result of the data analysis, the empirical findings suggest on the importance of the academic background, budgetary control, negative entrepreneurial experiences, building teams, geographical expansion and first critical experience as key attributes for scaling-up. Additionally, the data propose that constructive entrepreneurial ecosystem and reforms financing markets and programmes are two additional components that could moderate the interaction between the scaling-up process and the achievement of rapid sales results as a key outcome measure.

The first limitation was the lack of consensus on the phenomenon of the scaling up of entrepreneurship. Information in Latin America and emerging countries is scarce, which also represents an opportunity for other researchers to deepen and validate the results reported here. Even though it was an attempt to understand the issue of environmental change, this additional limitation did not allow the evaluation of these adjustments over time that can positively or negatively drive the strategies corresponding to the evolution in each of the moderator variables.

Because of the characteristics of the sample in terms of size of the SMEs, industrial sector, location, culture, socio-economic environment and years of establishment of the company, the study cannot be generalised in terms of other industrial sectors or countries. The results of this research are also limited to SMEs in Chile, and to the extent that it can be applied to emerging countries IT sectors with similar sample characteristics, it must be done so with caution. Yin states that eight cases “are sufficient replications to convince the reader of a general phenomenon”.

Policymakers have the option to identify what skills and knowledge the entrepreneur requires to be trained to scale up their established ventures. In this context, they will also benefit from the empirical contribution of knowing what the restrictions that limit this process are, such as adverse tax systems and public strategies. Additionally, it is of public interest because no national records exist on the presence of theoretical terms.

Even though the literature promotes the present findings, it shows that there is an absence of empirical evidence in emerging economies to better comprehend which factors may affect the development process of scaling up entrepreneurship in the IT sector. Both deliberate and emergent strategic initiatives are necessary for the scaling-up process where six critical factors are the basis of the scaling-up. This empirical contribution for entrepreneurs will support the achievement of rapid and sustained sales results for scaling up their ventures.