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This paper examines how some specific psychological characteristics and stress levels of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) key decision-makers (founders/managers) (KDMs) influence firm goal attainment based on two firm aspiration types.

This study hypothesizes that perceived resilience, social skills (self-promotion, ingratiation, expressiveness, social adaptability), and stress of SME KDMs will differently influence firm performance goal achievement based on firm historical versus social aspirations. IBM AMOS v27 is used to test these hypotheses on survey data of 267 Australian SME KDMs.

The study reveals that KDMs’ perceived resilience, social skills and stress differentially impact the achievement of firm performance goals when selecting firm-level historical and social aspirations. Resilience and some specific social skills can even have a detrimental effect on achieving firm goals when applying historical and social aspirations. Historical aspirations are based on the firm’s performance history, while social aspirations are based on the performance of a reference group of competitor firms. The differences in the relationship between these characteristics and the two aspiration types are also explained. Furthermore, the study reveals the important role of perceived stress levels in achieving firm performance goals, using both aspiration types.

This study is the first to investigate how the perceived use of some specific psychological characteristics of SME KDMs influence the ability to meet firm performance goals based on the discretionary use of historical and social aspirations and the relationship between these aspiration types. In this context, the paper explains the reasons for the differences and similarities in their use. Thus, this study provides an important empirical contribution to research on the emergent domain of micro-foundational SME goals.

When managers set aspirations for their firms, they typically compare their own firms' performance to past aspirations as well as to the performance of social reference groups. The authors explore how firm generic strategy affects managers' adaptation of firm aspirations in response to feedback from three social reference groups that vary in terms of breadth (population average, strategic group, and one direct rival).

The authors propose that firm generic strategy (low-cost or differentiation) functions as an organizational information filter through with managers interpret performance feedback. The authors test for whether generic strategy has a moderating effect on the influence of performance feedback from social reference groups.

Based on a longitudinal sample of US airlines, the study shows that all firms are influenced most strongly by their strategic groups. Low-cost and differentiation generic strategies differ in terms of which social reference group motivates a larger reaction when overperforming: low-cost firms are more influenced by the population average which is contributed to by the entire industry than are differentiating firms, while differentiating firms are more swayed by the narrow focus of their direct rivals than are low-cost firms.

Although firm strategy represents a core decision at the firm level, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, performance feedback research, surprisingly, has not yet integrated generic strategy into its models.

Performance feedback theory (PFT) has informed analyses in numerous national contexts and has been used to explain various business and management activities of firms. Stemming from behavioral theory and grounded in a cognitive perspective, which views organizational actions as being the results of decisions produced by groups of individual decision-makers, PFT research has mostly assumed the universal nature of cognition and decision-making processes. However, PFT also presumes that individual decision-makers bring with them different backgrounds and experiences. Hence, this paper offers propositions on how cultural differences in individualism-collectivism influence the major components of PFT, including the formation and revision of performance goals (aspiration levels), and search behaviors and risk preferences in response to gaps between goals and actual performance. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

This paper offers theoretical propositions for the above purpose.

This is not an empirical analysis.

By integrating the individualism-collectivism differences framework into the PFT model, the authors answer previous calls to integrate concepts and frameworks from other theories into PFT while considering the role of cultural differences in aspiration-consequence relationships. Additionally, much of PFT research has focused on outcomes, while actual internal processes have remained unobserved. By focusing on how cultural differences influence various PFT processes, this conceptual analysis sheds light on the unobserved bounds of decision-makers' cognitions.

This paper seeks to explore the effect of performance duration (rather than intensity) on the subsequent initiation of strategic change by firms. Specifically, the effect of outperformance and underperformance duration on strategic change, as well as the moderating effect of environmental dynamism, is studied.

Using a fixed-effects model, analyzing a sample of 34,907 firm-year observations from 1980 to 2018 across 112 industries mostly supported proposed hypotheses.

Results revealed a U-shaped relationship between outperformance duration and strategic change and an inverted U-shaped relationship between underperformance duration and strategic change. The moderation role of environmental dynamism was only partially supported.

This study examines a new dimension of performance feedback, namely duration, rather than the widely used intensity of performance feedback, to enhance our understanding of the behavioral theory of the firm.

According to behavioral research, aspirations influence a firm's search – exploitive and explorative – for solutions that satisfy a firm's goals. Yet, such goal seeking behavior is adaptive to a firm's past experiences and not to a manager's expectations of its firm's future. A manager's expectations are often explained in terms of their confidence in future events. The purpose of this study is to address the following research question: how does a manager's confidence influence its expectations of a firm's future performance and goals; and how do these future expectations influence a firm's exploitive/explorative search?

In drawing on cognition and legitimacy research, a conceptual model was developed to explain the antecedents and outcomes of a firm's “forward-looking” aspirations. The antecedents to a firm's forward-looking aspirations are attributed to a manager's overconfidence – anchoring, confirmation and availability – biases. In using strategic legitimacy explanations, these biases introduce distinct types of forward-looking (exploitive/explorative) search that legitimize/de-legitimize a manager's forward-looking aspirations.

A key finding of this study is that it introduces a strategic decision-making process in which a firm's exploitive/ explorative search is adaptive toward its forward-looking aspirations.

This forward-looking strategic decision-making process offers research implications to understand how a firm's future goals and expectations can offer new understandings of their past experiences and traditions and explains how a manager's overconfidence biases can influence the assessment of a firm's social aspirational groups.

In addition, this study also offers practical implications in which illustrative examples are used to explain this study's forward-looking strategic decision-making process.

A distinct contribution of this study is that it introduces a forward-looking orientation that has not been previously examined the backward focus of behavioral research.

This study aims to compare alternative search behaviors managers enact with regard to firm aspirations.

The behavioral theory of the firm predicts that poor performance relative to aspiration levels leads to search for ways to raise performance over aspirations. Most researchers have assumed search leads to risk‐taking or innovation. However, firms might search for ways to raise performance without incurring additional risk, such as reducing expenses. This paper compares the two models of search using data on research and development (R&D) spending.

The results generally support the cost cutting argument; R&D spending increases monotonically with performance relative to social aspirations.

These results suggest researchers need to consider searches that emphasize cost reduction, as well as searches that emphasize innovation.

Overall, this paper extends behavioral work on risk‐taking and R&D to provide a more complex view of the interactions between kinds of aspiration levels and both innovation and search behavior.

Although previous research has investigated how performance feedback may affect firms’ strategic actions, their findings has been inconsistent. The relationship between performance feedback and firms’ strategic activities thus appears complex. Moreover, the authors contend that it may vary with the measurement strategies employed (i.e. social or historical feedback, operationalizations of strategic actions or accounting- and market-based performance indicators) and the national contexts.

Therefore, the current article presents a comprehensive meta-analysis of prior research, including 1,637,817 sample observations from 101 studies that span more than 18 countries.

The results indicate that (1) performance that are below or above aspirational levels generally has a positive relationship with firms’ strategic actions; (2) these relationships are contingent on the implementation forms taken by the key variables, such as performance feedback, strategic actions and performance indicators; and (3) the relationships are much stronger in countries where managerial discretion is greater.

The findings contribute to the clarification of long-standing theoretical and empirical debates regarding the relationship between performance feedback and strategic actions, as well as some pertinent directions for future research.

The goals of this study were to examine the utility of social cognitive career theory in a South Asian context, extend SCCT beyond its individualistic roots to include social and contextual variables, and explore the possible differential validity of SCCT predictors for men and women.

The study involved an in‐class survey of Bangladeshi undergraduate engineering students including 209 women and 640 men.

Despite stronger relationships between persistence and two predictors – social aspirations and self‐efficacy – for men, self‐efficacy, the core construct of SCCT, was the most important predictor of persistence for both women and men thus supporting the applicability of SCCT in non‐Western contexts.

Several new measures were developed for this study which provide a basis for future research but will require further validation. The results demonstrated the applicability of SCCT in a non‐Western context but the amount of variance explained was modest. Thus, additional research into context‐specific factors affecting persistence is warranted.

The results suggest that interventions intended to enhance the participation of women in non‐traditional fields such as engineering should focus on enhancing self‐efficacy, potentially through creating a more supportive learning environment.

The current study is one of the first to assess the applicability of SCCT in a non‐Western context and to examine the differential validity of SCCT predictors for women and men.

Along with the other Nordic welfare states, Norway has achieved relative gender parity as measured by the Gender Gap Index of the United Nations (Hausmann, Tyson, & Zahidi, 2006) and is therefore looked upon by many as a model in minimising gender gaps in the society. With a 47 per cent share of the active labour force in the country, Norwegian women have had a high level of labour market participation since the late 1980s. In addition, Norway ranks among the top countries in the world in terms of offering women and men equal access to education at all levels, equal access to leadership positions in the workplace and in politics and generous parental leave benefits. Although gender parity in education at all levels as well as in labour market participation is a reality in Norway, there are significant gender differences vis-à-vis in career aspiration among students and the Norwegian labour market is characterized by gender segregation (Foss, 2005) which results in a gender gap in pay where women earn less than men.

The dichotomy of views on “arts for arts sake” and “art must meet commerce” elicits the clash about how creative entrepreneurs encounter the dilemma of fulfilling personal satisfaction and chasing entrepreneurial aspiration along the entrepreneurial process. It is argued whether or not creative entrepreneurs can integrate artistic creativity and entrepreneurial alertness to disentangle the conflict and tension between art and commerce in the guanxi embedded culture context. The complex guanxi ties of creative entrepreneurs identified as bonding ties with families, bridging ties with friends and social ties with colleagues are presumed to activate personal and social values.

The research design consists of two stages: face-to-face interviews and empirical survey. A total of four successful local creative entrepreneurs in craft arts were interviewed and asked questions related to their source of creative inspiration, market alertness and value creation. Findings derived from interviews enrich the questionnaire development of the empirical survey. The survey was conducted to realize the social phenomenon of creative entrepreneurs' guanxi, cognitive process and satisfaction with Taiwan's creative industry context. In total, 318 creative entrepreneurs’ responses were collected and analyzed by using structural equation modeling (SEM).

Results suggest that guanxi networks lead to the acquisition of various social resources that are conducive to alertness in entrepreneurial opportunities and stimulate artistic creativity, which in turn gratify creative entrepreneurs' senses of entrepreneurial satisfaction with life, work and social contribution, as well as achieve higher entrepreneurial aspiration, perceived as social recognition and meaning of work.

Results of this study enrich the understanding of creative entrepreneurs and their awareness of balancing opportunity alerting and artistic creativity while starting creative businesses. Diverseness and closeness of guanxi networks can fill the gap between art and market and further pave the way to winning aspiration.

This paper advances the existing literature on creative entrepreneurship by adopting guanxi network theory to explore entrepreneurs' cognitive process in the linkage of artistic creativity and entrepreneurial alertness and their mediating effects on perceived entrepreneurial satisfaction and aspiration.