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This chapter reports the results of an empirical study on the “gender–performance gap,” the alleged difference in business performance between firms started or owned by females and males. Although numerous studies have compared the business performance of firms started by or owned by female and male entrepreneurs, most research to date has employed financial performance metrics and has often produced inconsistent results. The present research compared gender-based business performance by examining self-perceptions of a large sample of female and male Black and Mexican-American entrepreneurs. As such, the present study overcame several limitations of prior gender–performance gap research and addressed entrepreneurial groups seldom studied. While there were no perceptual differences between female and male entrepreneurs surveyed regarding the performance of their respective businesses, Mexican-American entrepreneurs surveyed perceived the performance of their business as being better than Black entrepreneurs surveyed, and this result held for both females and males. Findings from the study provide insights into the perceptions held by Black and Mexican-American female and male entrepreneurs and provide a context for further race and gender studies.

The primary objective of the current study is to examine the role of leadership styles and Industry 4.0 in organization performance. In addition, the direct and indirect effect of job satisfaction, competitive advantage and business sustainability is also examined. For this purpose, a cross-sectional research design was selected. Population of the study were based on the manufacturing Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) of Thailand. Employees of these SMEs were selected to collect the data. Therefore, respondents of the study were employees of Thai manufacturing SMEs. Various close ended questions related to the concerned study were asked on a five-point Likert scale. Furthermore, this study analyzed the data with the help of Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Results of the study revealed that both leadership styles and Industry 4.0 have significant role in organization performance. Leadership styles and Industry 4.0 influence positively on job satisfaction and competitive advantage, respectively. Further, job satisfaction and competitive advantage influence positively on business sustainability. Finally, business sustainability significantly improves organization performance. Therefore, the current study has vital importance for practitioners to enhance organization performance through leadership styles and Industry 4.0.

The environment in which businesses perpetuate their vital existence can be named as VUCA due to its variable, uncertain, complex and ambiguous structure. In the world of VUCA, which is far beyond the classical environmental conditions, the success of the businesses largely depends on the performance level of the staff they employ. The high or low level can be directly affected by the leadership style which the business managers will be exhibiting. Agile leadership type emerges as one of the leadership styles that could be successful in such environmental conditions. For this reason, the main purpose of this section is to provide information about the agile leadership issues that play a fundamental role in the success of businesses in today’s VUCA world, which can positively affect the employee performance and this level of performance, and, at the same time, which could be successful in these environmental conditions. In order to achieve this aim, first of all, the concepts of agile leadership, employee performance and VUCA world are explained. In the following sections, agile leadership and the relationship of this leadership style with employee performance are discussed in the VUCA world spiral.

Scanning both the academic and popular business literature of the last 40 years puzzles the alert reader. The variety of prescriptions of how to be successful (effective, performing, etc.) 1 Organizational performance, organizational success and organizational effectiveness will be used interchangeably throughout this paper.1 in business is hardly comprehensible: “Being close to the customer,” Total Quality Management, corporate social responsibility, shareholder value maximization, efficient consumer response, management reward systems or employee involvement programs are but a few of the slogans introduced as means to increase organizational effectiveness. Management scholars have made little effort to integrate the various performance-enhancing strategies or to assess them in an orderly manner.

This study classifies organizational strategies by the importance each strategy attaches to different constituencies in the firm’s environment. A number of researchers divide an organization’s environment into various constituency groups and argue that these groups constitute – as providers and recipients of resources – the basis for organizational survival and well-being. Some theoretical schools argue for the foremost importance of responsiveness to certain constituencies while stakeholder theory calls for a – situation-contingent – balance in these responsiveness levels. Given that maximum responsiveness levels to different groups may be limited by an organization’s resource endowment or even counterbalanced, the need exists for a concurrent assessment of these competing claims by jointly evaluating the effect of the respective behaviors towards constituencies on performance. Thus, this study investigates the competing merits of implementing alternative business philosophies (e.g. balanced versus focused responsiveness to constituencies). Such a concurrent assessment provides a “critical test” of multiple, opposing theories rather than testing the merits of one theory (Carlsmith, Ellsworth & Aronson, 1976).

In the high tolerance level applied for this study (be among the top 80% of the industry) only a handful of organizations managed to sustain such a balanced strategy over the whole observation period. Continuously monitoring stakeholder demands and crafting suitable responsiveness strategies must therefore be a focus of successful business strategies. While such behavior may not be a sufficient explanation for organizational success, it certainly is a necessary one.

Limited access to capital is a classic issue in and a burden to micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Indonesia. The existence of the problem with information asymmetry and agency conflicts that are predominant at the level of small businesses, increasingly hampers the opportunity to obtain funds from various external sources. Especially for businesses that are at the pioneering stage, entrepreneurs are required to think creatively, have the courage to take risks, and be independent in fulfilling resources to realize business opportunities. The availability of funds certainly has an impact on business performance, either directly or indirectly. Based on a literature review, business performance is categorized into financial and non-financial dimensions with various measurement proxies. However, some of the models and measurements proposed are not always suitable in assessing the performance of MSMEs, especially in the startup phase. Therefore, this chapter concurrently describes the funding patterns and the funding alternatives to measure the performance of new businesses based on the existing literature. Theoretically, this research adds a perspective in the field of entrepreneurial finance regarding funding patterns that can be implemented by startup businesses in Indonesia and provides a proposal for measuring the concept of performance that is more adaptive and comprehensive for businesses in the startup stage. The implication of this research for entrepreneurs leads to the need to adjust funding decisions according to the changing stages of the business lifecycle and to expand the funding window to support the sustainability of small businesses.

The study this chapter reports focuses on how network theory contributes to the understanding of the internationalization process of SMEs and measures the effect of network capability on performance in international trade and has three research objectives.

The first objective of the study relates to providing new insights into the international market development activities through the application of a network perspective. The chapter reviews the international business literature to ascertain the development of thought, the research gaps, and the shortcomings. This review shows that the network perspective is a useful and popular theoretical domain that researchers can use to understand international activities, particularly of small, high technology, resource-constrained firms.

The second research objective is to gain a deeper understanding of network capability. This chapter presents a model for the impact of network capability on international performance by building on the emerging literature on the dynamic capabilities view of the firm. The model conceptualizes network capability in terms of network characteristics, network operation, and network resources. Network characteristics comprise strong and weak ties (operationalized as foreign-market entry modes), relational capability, and the level of trust between partners. Network operation focuses on network initiation, network coordination, and network learning capabilities. Network resources comprise network human-capital resources, synergy-sensitive resources (resource combinations within the network), and information sharing within the network.

The third research objective is to determine the impact of networking capability on the international performance of SMEs. The study analyzes 11 hypotheses through structural equations modeling using LISREL. The hypotheses relate to strong and weak ties, the relative strength of strong ties over weak ties, and each of the eight remaining constructs of networking capability in the study. The research conducts a cross-sectional study by using a sample of SMEs drawn from the telecommunications industry in Ireland.

The study supports the hypothesis that strong ties are more influential on international performance than weak ties. Similarly, network coordination and human-capital resources have a positive and significant association with international performance. Strong ties, weak ties, trust, network initiation, synergy-sensitive resources, relational capability, network learning, and information sharing do not have a significant association with international performance. The results of this study are strong (R2=0.63 for performance as the outcome) and provide a number of interesting insights into the relations between collaboration or networking capability and performance.

This study provides managers and policy makers with an improved understanding of the contingent effects of networks to highlight situations where networks might have limited, zero, or even negative effects on business outcomes. The study cautions against the tendency to interpret networks as universally beneficial to business development and performance outcomes.

Digitalization is considered an emerging phenomenon that enables businesses to develop new markets and business models. It helps firms expand the scope of their activities and enables organizations to become more efficient. It is now a reality for firms and contributes to their value creation. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between digitalization and firm performance through the mediating role of business model innovation (BMI) and to do so, a self-administered questionnaire with a sample of 70 Tunisian firms was conducted for this purpose. The main result of the analysis, confirms that digitalization is positively related to business performance, with BMI mediating this relationship.

Women's contributions to socio-economic development of many developed and developing economies have improved substantially over the years. However, women participation in economic development and contributions to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are still inadequate as a result of insufficient access to finance to enhance their business performance and other challenging factors such as infrastructure, government policy and enabling business environment. This study aimed to examine the financing issues faced with female entrepreneurs in Nigeria in terms of supply side finance gap that hinders their performance. Other specific objectives are to: establish reasons for external source of finance; identify various financial options available for female-owned businesses in Nigeria; investigate the effect of financial options on the performances of female-owned businesses in Nigeria. Survey research design was employed with administration of structured questionnaire on nine hundred and seventy five (975) female entrepreneurs of selected Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) from the population of nine million, six hundred and two thousand, two hundred and forty nine (9,602,249). Data analysis was carried out using descriptive statistics (frequency, percentages, mean, standard deviation) and inferential statistics of regression analysis. Results of the regression analysis at 5% significant level using two-tailed test for all the variables of financial options displayed significant effects on the performance of female businesses in Nigeria. It was recommended that more female-owned businesses should take the advantage of these financial options to enhance business performance as only 38% of them have successfully utilized these financial sources to bridge the finance gap.

Several studies have proposed that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) lack resources and experiential knowledge to internationalise to distant markets. The authors argue that SMEs can handle the lack of these tangible and intangible internal resources through external collaborations; they can achieve success in international markets by collaborating with business partners. The role of inter-firm marketing collaboration and its impact on internationalisation efforts has not been thoroughly studied, particularly in the context of SMEs. This study will thus advance our understanding of SMEs’ inter-firm marketing collaborations and how they influence performance in international markets. In this chapter, authors conceptually develop this line of arguments through an extensive literature review and develop some hypotheses and a framework that can be empirically tested. The authors believe this framework will serve as a starting point for further studies on this topic. Theoretically, we endeavour to contribute by showing that firms can enhance their level of international performance through inter-firm collaboration. The authors believe this type of study would have considerable theoretical as well as managerial implications in this important field of research.