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The questions of when and what types of human resource (HR) support are needed tend to be unanswerable for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This article addresses this gap in the strategic HR literature. Hiring, training, employee retention/satisfaction, wages and benefits programs, and worker's compensation insurance are important to SMEs seeking to build strong capabilities and resources and to increase their competitive advantage.This article presents an analysis of the existing HR literature for SMEs. It introduces a decision model to help SMEs choose a cost-effective HR strategy, listing a range of options from hiring the HR function to electronic HR (eHR) and outsourcing

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.

Small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) are typically reported to have a limited interest in broader societal concerns across the world. As a result, the purpose of this study is to develop a model of SME’s strategic philanthropic performance in light of the societal reactions to the COVID-19 issue, particularly in terms of the intervention of corporate spirituality and the solid regulatory motive behind these.

A systematic mixed review analysis has been executed to analyze the strategic philanthropic performance configuration triggered by the recent COVID-19 crisis, in which over 369 publications are read and reviewed by the authors. It has also established the reliability and validity of literature analysis. Also besides, a short form of qualitative investigation has been used to support the direction of the study.

Through regulatory adjustments, the study's findings effectively developed a strategic philanthropic performance configuration for SMEs. In this case, the strategic philanthropic convergence of corporate giving, corporate volunteering, corporate foundation and food bank has the potential to help SMEs thrive in the long run. The study also discovers that corporate spirituality might potentially mediate between appropriate regulations and strategic philanthropic performance of SMEs in the context of a supportive external environment.

Prior empirical attempts are subsequently required to inquiry about the proposed conceptualization from different perspectives.

The decision-makers of SMEs, with the efficient implementation of the proposed outline, will use the understanding given for their required actions to develop the competitive advantage in terms of social concerns. On this note, the outcomes of the study can also enhance business differentiation and competitiveness. It can also serve as a strategic guideline for firms to develop organizational values for long-term survival.

In the COVID-19 reality, SMEs will contribute to the concerns through philanthropy activities that are better suited for both enhanced social good and greater corporate advantages. The idea can also serve as a basis for SMEs to accomplish the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first research that conceptualizes the influence of government regulation on the strategic philanthropic performance of SMEs while taking corporate spirituality into account in order to survive the COVID-19 crisis.

This study aims to address how the ISO 14001 standardisation and certification process improves substantive performance in small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through the development of an environmental management control system (EMCS).

A qualitative cross-case interview design with those responsible for the implementation of an environmental management system (certified to ISO 14001) in SMEs is adopted to inductively “theorise” the EMCS.

The design and monitoring of environmental controls are often beyond the scope of the SMEs’ top management team and include extra-organisational dimensions such as the external audit and institutional requirements. This suggests more complex control pathways for SMEs to produce EMCS that primarily function as packages and are broader than the analytical level of the firm. Here, controlling for environmental performance exists at strategic and operational levels, as well as beyond the SMEs’ boundaries.

Various internal controls are put forward for SME owner-managers to meet environmental targets (e.g. gamification and interpersonal communication strategies). This builds upon a broader accountability perspective wherein formalised hierarchical control is only one route for ensuring sustainable action within the ISO 14001-certified SMEs.

This study contributes to a more sustainable society through developing an understanding of how environmental sustainability is substantively managed by SMEs to improve performance for current and future generations.

This paper, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is one of the first to establish how SMEs control for environmental sustainability from empirically derived evidence. In doing so, it provides an example of the EMCS for the SME context.

This paper examines whether and when improvement routines are critical for implementing lean practices in small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs). Improvement routines such as “employees initiate and carry through improvement activities” are generally seen as an important means to achieve the full benefit of structural lean interventions. Womack and Jones (2003) suggest that these improvement routines should be developed as the company becomes more experienced in lean. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relative importance of individual improvement routines at various degrees of lean practice implementation.

A Between-Case Comparison Analysis (Dul and Hak, 2012) and a Necessary Condition Analysis (Dul, 2016) were performed on self-assessment data from 241 respondents at 38 Dutch manufacturing SMEs.

The importance of improvement routines depended on the degree of lean practice implementation. Lean practices could be implemented to some extend without developing specific improvement routines, yet certain routines were necessary for more advanced implementations of lean. These routines relate to employees conducting shared improvement activities and in the most advanced cases to aligning different improvement activities.

These findings question existing lean implementation models that neglect improvement routines and indicate the need to integrate improvement routines into every lean transformation for it to be sustainable.

While there are several readiness assessments regarding digital transformation (DT) and Industry 4.0 in extant literature, this study aims to contribute to (a) a better understanding of digital readiness in supply chain (SC) aspects and (b) elaborate on differences between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises.

The study is based on 409 companies that participated in the Digital Readiness Check (DRC) in the region of Salzburg (Austria) and Bavaria (Germany) – an online assessment for self-evaluating the digital readiness of companies.

The study's results provide insights for the categories of strategy, employees, initiation of business transactions and SC. These are further differentiated for SMEs and large enterprises.

The study is limited to two regions in Austria and Germany, based on a self-evaluation of companies in a single point of time perspective. For future research, the results of this study should be expanded for different regions. Further, the results could be validated regarding external observations and measuring results at a later point of time.

The DRC may help companies in benchmarking themselves and gaining a better understanding about categories that must be improved, especially regarding SC aspects of DT.

The DRC extends extant literature regarding the differentiation between SMEs and large enterprises as well as focussing on SC aspects of DT.

This paper analyzes the productivity effects of structural capital such as research and development (R&D) and organizational capital (OC). Innovation work also produces innovation-labor-biased technical change (IBTC) and knowledge spillovers. Analyses use full register-based dataset of Finnish firms for the period 1994–2014 from Statistics Finland.

Intangibles are derived from the labor costs of innovation-type occupations using linked employer-employee data. The approach is consistent with National Accounting and offered as one method in OECD (2010) and applied in statistical offices, e.g. in measuring software. The EU 7th framework Innodrive project 2008–2011 extended this method to cover R&D and OC.

Methodology is implementable at firm-level and offers way to link personnel reporting to intangible assets. The OC-IBTC as well as total resources allocated to OC are relevant for productivity growth. The R&D stock is relatively higher but R&D-IBTC is smaller than OC-IBTC. Public policy should, besides technology policy, account for OC and OC-IBTC and related knowledge spillovers in the industries that are most important among the SMEs (low market-share-firms).

The data are based on remote access to Statistics Finland; the data cannot be disseminated.

Intangible assets are measured from innovation work that encompasses not only R&D work. IBTC is proxied in production function estimation by relative compensations on IA work. The non-competing nature of IAs is captured by IA knowledge spillovers. The sample sizes are much higher than in earlier studies on horizontal knowledge spillovers (such as for SMEs,) thus bringing additional generality to the results.

This paper aims to unpack how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can operationalise coopetition in talent management, addressing ongoing talent shortages in the hospitality industry which were intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This conceptual paper draws from literature on coopetition and talent management in SMEs. Specifically, the authors take an interorganisational talent pool lens and develop a framework following the principles of open-systems theory.

The authors find that the traditional use of talent pools is often impractical for SMEs because of a lack of resources and capabilities. Instead, interorganisational talent pools, through coopetition in talent management, can aid these firms to address talent shortages. The authors identify potential for SME coopetition at various stages, including attraction, development and retention of talent.

Coopetition in talent management can aid industries in establishing market-thickening pipelines. Through co-attracting, co-developing and co-retaining talent, SMEs can create interorganisational talent pools. To develop talent management coopetition, a set of prerequisites, catalysts and potential inhibitors must be analysed and managed.

This paper moves the talent management debate beyond competition for talent, introducing coopetition as a viable alternative. Taking an open-systems perspective, the authors develop an integrative framework for coopetition in talent management in SMEs encompassing input, process and output components. The authors reveal the dynamic and complex nature of this coopetition process, highlighting the essential role of coopetition context and illustrating open-system principles.

To endure and cope in the rapidly changing environment, it is required of firms to gain a deeper acquisition of knowledge on market dynamics and subsequently concentrate on corporations' capacity to create, restructure and integrate their internal and external competences. Hence, the objective of this study is to investigate the influence of eco-dynamic capability (EDC) on the sustainability performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Structured questionnaires were used to obtain primary data. The data were solicited from 500 employees and owner-managers of SMEs. The study’s hypotheses were tested using standard multiple regression through IBM SPSS Statistics (version 24).

The study revealed that EDC has a substantial positive effect on the economic, social and environmental sustainability performance dimensions.

The focus of this study is on EDC. Thus, although dynamic capability has been the subject of substantial study, little is known regarding the effect of EDC on the economic sustainability performance (ESP) (financial), environmental sustainability performance (ENSP) and social sustainability performance (SSP) of SMEs, predominantly amongst SMEs in emerging economies.

E-business maturity models have been widely used to guide the process of digital transformation of business. However, these models have been criticized for their predominantly technocentric approach, which is poorly suited for SMEs. The purpose of this paper is to produce a holistic, nonlinear e-business development model for SMEs that takes into account the interactions of the organization in the pursuit of its business objectives.

Based on the literature review, this paper proposes a nonlinear digital development model for SMEs that factors in the interactions between digital technologies and organizational processes. The model is applied to three cases using a qualitative research approach.

The analysis of the cases demonstrates how the model recognizes that SMEs have an agile and flexible operating structure and reduces the role of technology in order to refocus the entrepreneurs on the relationship among business goals, organizational capabilities and communication requirements.

The proposed model helps the business owners to clarify and better understand what kind of interaction levels exist between the relevant actors in the pursuit of the firm's goals and to identify the best mix of digital and nondigital communication methods to support their work. It also assists policymakers to overcome technological bias when assessing the current state of play of e-business development in the SME universe and formulate actions that support the development of digitally oriented SMEs.

This paper proposes a novel, nonlinear, interaction-based development model for SMEs in order to complement previous technocentric models focusing mainly on a mechanist perspective of e-business maturity models.