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The purpose of this paper is to understand firm‐level entrepreneurship in diverse organizational contexts and explain its relationship with organizational factors.

The paper adopts a multiple‐case research design. In‐depth interviews are conducted with key informants in four cases. In each case, a firm‐level entrepreneurial story is focused on to understand the entrepreneurial process within its organizational context.

The findings show that there are two types of entrepreneurial activities in organizations – beyond‐boundary focus and within‐boundary focus. They exhibit different patterns regarding their relationship with organizational factors – top management leadership, strategic orientation, organizational culture, internal mechanisms and organizational performance.

Generalizability of the results may be limited due to the case study design of this research.

Top management leadership has a vital role in influencing entrepreneurial activity in organizations. When an organizational environment that favours entrepreneurship is supported by top management, then business‐level entrepreneurial activities are cultivated across the company. But if the organizational environment does not favour entrepreneurship, then entrepreneurial activity is mostly limited to the corporate level and only initiated by top management.

The multiple case analyses provide an extensive analysis of the organizational context and firm‐level entrepreneurship. Additionally, the emergent categories of two different types of entrepreneurial activities serve as a major and relevant step to reduce the ambiguity present in the field of study.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a better understanding of the relationship between firm-level entrepreneurship and organizational performance in an emerging economy through assessing the mediating influence of strategic entrepreneurship between entrepreneurial orientation and organizational performance. The extant literature on the relationship between firm-level entrepreneurship and organizational performance points to a lack of clarification of the link between real entrepreneurial events and organizational performance.

Data are collected from 324 respondents in 118 companies in four different industries. The paper adopts structural equation modeling to test the mediated relationship.

The results show that strategic entrepreneurship fully mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and organizational performance, assessed as two major categories of financial and non-financial performance.

The dominance of four industries in the data set limits the generalizability of the findings.

Findings highlight strategic and practical implications for managers especially in emerging economies who seek to enhance competitive advantage and exploit market opportunities through entrepreneurial initiatives.

The current study develops a measure of strategic entrepreneurship concept and attempts to contribute to the literature through differentiating between behavioral intentions toward entrepreneurship and real entrepreneurial events at the firm-level to serve as a step to reduce the ambiguity present in the field.

The accounting literature has traditionally focused on firm-level studies to examine the capital market implications of earnings and other accounting variables. We first develop the arguments for studying capital market implications at the aggregate level as well. A central issue is that diversification makes equity investors at least partially and potentially almost completely immune to several firm-level properties of earnings by holding diversified portfolios. Diversification is particularly important when assessing the welfare consequences of random errors in accounting measurement (imperfect accruals) and, to the extent it is independent across firms, of deliberate manipulation (earnings management). Consequently, some firm-level metrics of association, timeliness, value relevance, conservatism and other earnings properties do not map easily into investor welfare. Similarly, earnings-related risk manifests itself to equity investors largely through systematic earnings risk (covariation with aggregate earnings and/or other macroeconomic indicators). We conclude that the design and evaluation of financial reporting must adopt at least in part an aggregate perspective. We then summarize the literature in accounting, economics and finance on aggregate earnings and stock prices. Our review highlights the importance of studying earnings at the aggregate level.

This study aims to examine the relationships between customer satisfaction and a variety of company performance metrics at the firm‐level of analysis.

The primary research method used in the study was a longitudinal analysis of series of quarterly surveys of customer attitudes, in relation to various company performance metrics of one large Fortune 100 company. The data were collected over a five‐year period and were analyzed with several statistical tests of association.

It was found that there are significant, and moderate‐to‐strong associations between satisfaction levels and a firm's financial and market performance. More specifically, there are strong links between customer satisfaction, and retention, revenue, earnings per share, stock price, and Tobin's q.

The main implication of this study is that the longitudinal findings demonstrate a strong consistent link between customer attitudes and financial performance at the firm level. The study is clearly limited to one firm, from one industry sector, but offers future researchers a wealth of replication opportunities.

Numerous experts have noted that marketing needs to document the financial impact of marketing activities. Unlike most studies in this area, this study investigated these associations at the firm level, rather than at the aggregate or industry level where some relationships are potentially masked. The study also investigated the links between satisfaction and financial performance in the business‐to‐business services sector, rather than in business‐to‐customer services. Finally, the firm provided access to large samples of real customer attitude data over a five‐year period, rather than from a cross‐sectional study.

This paper aims to contribute to the regionalisation–globalisation debate in international business (IB) by providing a longitudinal analysis of firm-level multinationality. The analysis uses a unique hand-collected data set of both accounting (sales) and non-accounting (subsidiaries) data. The percentage of foreign sales is also used as an additional measure of multinationality.

This paper categorises constituent firms of the Financial Times Stock Exchange 350 index over an 18-year time period from 1998 to 2015. Firms are categorised using the multinationality classification system developed by Aggarwal et al. (2011). The paper also conducts an industrial analysis across ten industries.

The evidence shows increasing multinationality over time that suggests a “trans-regional” operational strategy rather than a global or regional one. The results also show that UK firms are more multinational based on subsidiaries than sales. This contradicts the traditional stages theory of internationalisation where firms first expand sales, then subsidiaries. While some support for triad regions is found, there is also evidence of firm-level operations expanding beyond the triad regions of North America, Asia and Europe to non-triad regions such as Africa, Oceania and South America. The industrial analysis shows that non-service firms are more multinational than service firms.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to provide an in-depth longitudinal analysis of the geographical dispersion using both sales and subsidiaries data for UK firms. This paper provides a unique perspective on the regionalisation–globalisation debate in IB and presents evidence contrary to traditional stages theories of firm-level internationalisation.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for positioning the research contributions on the analysis of firm‐level international competitiveness and addressing the key issues on this topic.

Linking the concepts of internationalization, performance, and firm‐level competitiveness, the paper proposes a framework for identifying the different dimensions of international competitiveness. Literature on each dimension is reviewed and the linkages between them are discussed.

The paper unbundles the construct of international competitiveness into three dimensions: “ex ante” competitiveness, relating to firm‐ and location‐specific advantages as drivers of competitiveness; firm internationalization profile, resulting from the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of a firm's presence abroad; “ex post” competitiveness, relating to market, financial and nonfinancial performance of a firm in foreign markets.

Although the analysis of international competitiveness benefits from contributions from different research streams such as international business, marketing, and strategic management, the lack of an organizing framework makes it difficult to “handle” within a potentially huge body of literature. This paper contributes to fill this gap. In addition, it provides the basis for a new research agenda about the analysis of the internationalization‐performance relationship.

This is a longitudinal study exploring the effect of ISO 9000 certification on firm's financial performance in the pre-crisis period and the 2008 financial crisis period.

The empirical analysis is based on a 22-year dataset with balance sheet data from 136 Greek listed firms covering the period 1992–2013. A matching technique is applied to properly estimate potential differences in the impact of ISO 9000 on firm's financial performance between the groups of certified and matched non-certified (control) firms in the entire period but, most importantly, in pre-crisis vs crisis periods, using the difference-in-differences econometric approach.

The findings indicate that certified firms exhibit significantly higher financial performance relative to the matched non-certified group in both the pre-crisis and crisis periods, which tends to persist for several years post-certification. The financial crisis has a negative and statistically significant effect on firm performance in both the certified and matched non-certified groups, which nevertheless did not differ significantly between them. Controlling for sectoral and technological differences did not harm the higher performance of certified firms relative to the matched control peers. The results remain in the same direction when the authors test the ISO 9000 effect in the sub-group of certified firms that obtained the certification at the firm-level.

The study is original in its sample design and hypothesis testing. The matched sample created from a sufficiently long and continuous time dataset enabled the authors to properly estimate firm performance differences of ISO 9000 between pre-crisis and crisis periods. Of additional value is the testing of sectoral/technological differences and the distinction between firm-level and plant-level certification.

In this chapter, we document the growing importance of FDI from BRIC countries in relation to FDI from both developed and developing countries and investigate the types of firms that are responsible for BRIC FDI.

We follow a two-step empirical approach. First, we provide macro evidence on FDI from BRIC countries. We use UNCTAD data to highlight the patterns of FDI flows and stocks. Second, we provide firm-level evidence on FDI. Using ORBIS data, we elaborate a rich taxonomy of FDI that accounts for the decision to invest abroad and for the location, ownership, and number of foreign subsidiaries. Thus, we characterize BRIC multinationals’ involvement in FDI and examine the relationship between FDI and performance at the firm level.

We unveil new facts about BRIC multinationals. BRIC multinationals are in the minority in their home countries, but they outperform domestic enterprises. Within the group of BRIC investors, those firms that invest in developing countries, that operate in joint ventures, or that have more than five foreign subsidiaries are in the minority, but they outperform those firms that select other FDI strategies.

Our estimates document a positive and robust correlation between FDI and performance; however, the cross-sectional nature of our data does not permit a proper causality analysis.

Our work contributes to the International Economics literature on internationalization and firm performance as well as to the International Business literature on FDI from emerging economies. With respect to the former, we innovate by studying the relation between FDI strategies and firm performance. In relation to the latter, we innovate by introducing firm-level data and a cross-country approach that lets us illustrate the roles and features of FDI from BRIC countries.

This study aims to examine the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership (EL) and new product development performance (NPDP) at the firm level (level 2) of analysis and employee’s creativity (EC) at the cross level (level 1) of analysis. It also examines the serial mediations of (1) intrinsic motivation (IM)-EC and (2) creative self-efficacy (CSE)-EC on the relationship between EL and NPDP.

A systematic random sampling technique was used to collect data through self-administered surveys from leaders and employees of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Pakistan’s IT sector. Analysis was conducted on net responses from 114 leaders and 476 employees.

The results revealed significant positive associations between EL and NPDP at the firm level of analysis and EC at the cross level of analysis. The results of the cross-level serial mediations show that (1) IM and EC, and (2) CSE and EC serially mediate the relationship between EL and NPDP.

This study is among the few to use the Coleman bathtub model to show top-down and bottom-up relationships. The study extends and complements the multilevel perspective on leadership and new product development research by simultaneously examining the relationships between EL and NPDP at the individual and firm levels.

We contribute to the emerging literature on strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its antecedents by undertaking a systematic analysis of the effect of rivalry on firm and industry CSR. We deal with the codetermination of competition and CSR by using instrumental variables in the firm-level analysis and by modeling it directly in the industry-level analysis. We find that higher intensity of rivalry and CSR of competitors increase firm CSR, ceteris paribus; however, in a more dynamic setting when firms can change their production output, more competition in fact decreases aggregate industry CSR. While seemingly contradictory, these findings suggest interesting implications for both managers and public policy makers.