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This paper aims to analyze the impact of brand management system (BMS) practices on subjective and objective performance in both service- and product-oriented sectors.

Based on a “grounded-in-practice” approach to BMS, a comprehensive formative BMS scale is developed and its validity is assessed. The impact of BMS on subjective brand performance (i.e. predictive validity) and on objective financial performance is assessed. Data are collected from a sample of 298 brand managers and marketing directors in five business sectors (cosmetics, convenience goods, industry, bank/insurance and media) and from a financial database. Path analysis and multigroup analysis are performed to test mediating and moderating effects.

The results reveal that subjective brand performance (perceived brand performance) mediates the relationship between the BMS and objective financial performance of the firm and on each of the three BMS dimensions; and product-oriented (vs service-oriented) sector positively moderates the relationship between the BMS and subjective brand performance.

The paper offers insights into adapting brand management practices along all BMS dimensions to achieve better business performance and improve objective financial performance in product-oriented activities. It highlights the role of brand management implementation, as well as the role of brand management in hierarchical relationships, in improving performance in service activities.

The formative BMS scale offers a tool which can be used to improve strategic decisions and give practical guidance on product vs service sector specificities. The indirect impact of a BMS on financial objective performance reinforces the legitimacy of brand managers and marketing managers.

This paper shows the impact of the BMS on objective financial performance by using a “grounded-in-practice” BMS scale. It also affords explanation on sectoral effects of brand management practices and their consequences on subjective and objective performance.

Prior research indicates that family businesses have fewer management control practices in place and are more likely to have non-economic goals for their firm. Further, researchers in this domain contend that female-controlled businesses tend to underperform compared to male-controlled businesses. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the performance effects of management controls and goals for the business across both male and female-controlled farm and rural family businesses.

The data used in the analyses are from the 2012 Intergenerational Farm and Non-Farm Family Business Survey. The sample comprises 576 small- and medium-sized rural family businesses. The authors used probit analysis to model both family business objective and subjective success for women and men.

The results suggest that female-controlled farm and rural family businesses do not underperform their male counterparts in terms of objective or subjective assessments of performance. The results do indicate, however, that strategic management via management control practices within the firm influence objective and subjective performance differently across male and female-controlled farm and rural family businesses.

The results provide three primary contributions to the family business literature. First, the authors determined that strategic management practices via management control mechanisms, as well as the monitoring of managers, are of significance to the objective performance (i.e. gross income) of both men and women-controlled farm and rural family businesses. Second, the authors found that communicating economic vs non-economic goals do not influence satisfaction with the firm’s performance, but do influence the probability of success for female-controlled family businesses. Finally, the authors find that when we compare male and female-controlled businesses in the same industry, while controlling for family and business factors, men and women do not differ in a statistical sense in objective or subjective performance.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of a specific mechanism for cross-functional integration (CFI) in the relationship between product innovation and firm performance. It takes a contingency perspective, accounting for how these relationships vary depending on the degree of organizational knowledge complexity.

Hypotheses are tested via regression analysis with interaction effects in a sample of 105 wineries from Spain, using both objective and subjective firm performance data.

The results obtained confirm the existence of significant triple interaction effect of CFI, knowledge complexity and product innovation on firm performance. CFI has a negative moderating effect on the relationship between product innovation and performance and this effect varies according to the degree of organizational knowledge complexity.

This paper looks at variables that have been hitherto studied at the project or product level, at the firm level, in an attempt to untangle the relationship between innovation, CFI, knowledge complexity and firm performance. Study’s main limitations lie in the use of a cross-functional design and its focus on a single industry.

Firms dealing with complex organizational knowledge could use this CFI mechanism in the development of new products when their size and resources do not allow the creation of more formal temporal structures, such as cross-functional teams. However, unless the winery has to deal with a high degree of knowledge complexity, involving the oenologist in several functional areas for the purpose of coordination, may detract resources from product innovation effort and lead to a poorer performance.

This study showcases a mechanism of CFI not explored in previous research, but used in practice at many firms, i.e. the cross-pollination of ideas across different functional areas through the participation of the responsible for the product development, and tests its role in the relationship between product innovation and different types of firm performance.

The purpose of this study is to investigate empirically the balanced scorecard (BSC)’s theoretical underpinnings.

This study undertakes a cross-sectional, self-administered e-mail survey to examine the convergent and discriminant validity of the performance indicators of the BSC’s four perspectives using principal components analysis and confirmatory factor analysis.

The results suggest that the performance indicators of each BSC’s perspective converge with the same perspective’s performance indicators and discriminate from other perspectives’ performance indicators.

Future researchers are invited to conduct conceptual-level tests of the BSC framework using the newly constructed subjective scales of the performance indicators of the BSC’s perspectives. Furthermore, scholars conducting empirical research on the field are encouraged to further investigate the BSC’s theoretical underpinnings using various research designs, multiple research methods and a combination of existing and new BSC’s performance indicators.

This study contributes to the academic stream of management accounting and strategic management field by: empirically validating the BSC’s theoretical underpinnings that is a prerequisite for the BSC to advance from a framework to a theory and providing subjective scales for measuring the generic performance indicators of the BSC’s four perspectives that can be used in future research of the BSC framework’s hypotheses. In addition, the literature is enhanced with a newly developed perceptual measure of firm performance with attributes of the BSC’s four perspectives.

The purpose of this paper is to explore two basic research questions: what are the effects of information technology (IT) capability and employee empowerment on the innovativeness of small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), and what are the effects of innovativeness and IT capability on firm performance in SMEs?

Data from 109 Polish SMEs were collected. In order to identify empirical dimensions of innovativeness, empowerment and IT capability, a factor analysis was carried out. Multiple regression analysis was employed to examine the effects of IT capability and employee empowerment on innovativeness, and the effects of IT capability and innovativeness on firm performance.

The following results are offered: innovation activity of SMEs is positively related to technological turbulence, climate for innovation, investments in innovation and use of IT in internal communications; innovation activity and IT knowledge have a positive effect on subjective measures of firm performance; and subjective measures of firm performance are significantly correlated with objective ones. The results of this study do not confirm that IT capability has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between innovativeness and firm performance.

The findings identify the factors that are significantly related to innovation activity and the dimensions of the constructs under study that contribute to firm performance in SMEs.

To the knowledge of the authors, no previous studies conducted with regards to SMEs have examined the relationships between innovativeness, empowerment, IT capability and firm performance in an integrated way. The findings suggest some direct and indirect relationships between different dimensions of these constructs.

This study examines the interrelationships between aspects of entrepreneurial, market, and learning orientations, and international entrepreneurial business venture (IEBV) performance.

Data were collected from 396 entrepreneurs and 143 senior managers from early stage, growth‐oriented firms in the Republic of South Africa. These firms had an international focus in that 20 per cent began exporting from their inception and the remaining 80 per cent either began exporting within three years of inception or planned to export within three years of inception. Given the multidimensional nature of IEBV performance, structural equation modeling (AMOS) was used to test the measurement and substantive models.

Results indicate that IEBV performance is positively related to the innovativeness component of an entrepreneurial orientation (EO), a market orientation, and a learning orientation. Contrary to expectations, the communications aspect of EO is inversely related to objective performance measures.

By design, only successful IEBVs in South Africa were studied, potentially limiting generalizability.

Financiers can enhance the probability of success by assigning a greater weight to an entrepreneur's creativity.

This is the first examination of the role of all three orientations and multidimensional measures of objective and subjective performance. It examines South Africa, a more dynamic, changing and hostile business environment. Managers and financiers can enhance their probability of success by developing the different orientations.

Corporate responsibility and sustainability (CRS) have emerged as an important topic today. At the same time, alliances and coopetition arrangements, as vehicles for inter-firm collaboration have been shown to support firm performance. Still, there has been a lack of research into how coopetition (collaboration with competing firms) in this area may support firm performance.

This study aims to untangle the relationship between coopetition arrangements including CRS and firm performance. The model permits garnering social performance, which is a key to CRS, and to move beyond the traditional view of the coopetition–firm–economic–performance relationship. This study is based on a survey and primary data from 215 firms in Australia. This study uses multiple indicators for the concepts. Relationships are estimated by multiple regression analyses.

Using survey data from 215 firms in Australia, the research findings confirm that coopetition in CRS can lead to improved firm performance, both in relation to financial and social performances. However, the association between coopetition in CRS and financial performance loses its significance when social performances is introduced as an additional control variable. Further, stakeholder attributes (i.e., effective power and legitimate stake) moderate the relationship between coopetition in CRS and firm financial performance. However, there was no evidence of moderation for the coopetition in CRS – firm social performance relationship.

This study contributes to both coopetition and corporate social responsibility research. This study demonstrates that improved firm performance may be achieved through the promotion of CRS initiatives when a coopetitive approach is adopted, particularly where an understanding of stakeholder attributes is also evident. Firms do not need to shoulder corporate social responsibility alone. They need to find well-fitting partners. There are new ways to improve sustainability in terms of nature and human relationships.

Firms do not need to shoulder Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) alone. They need to find well-fitting partners.

This study provides very novel insights by having integrated the literature on coopetition, corporate social responsibility and sustainability resulting in a new conceptual framework that combines coopetition in CRS and performance. The new conceptual framework has both practical and research implications for coopetition in CRS and firm performance.

Firm’s operating contexts and asymmetric perspectives of success versus failure outcomes are two essential features typically absent in research on firms’ implemented strategies. The study here describes and provides examples of formal case-based models (i.e., constructing algorithms) of firms implemented strategies within several of 81 potential context (task environments) configurations – large vs small, service vs production orientation, low vs high competitive intensity, low vs high technological turbulence, and ambiguous settings for each. The study applies the tenets of complexity theory (e.g., equifinality, causal asymmetry, and single causal insufficiency). The study proposes a meso-theory and empirical testing position for solving “the crucial problem in strategic management” (Powell, Lovallo, & Fox, 2011, p. 1370) – firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. A workable solution is to identify/describe implemented executive capability strategies that identify firms in alternative specific task environments which are consistently accurate in predicting success (or failure) of all firms for specific implemented capabilities/context configuration. The study shows how researchers can perform “statistical sameness testing” and avoid the telling weaknesses and “corrupt practices” of symmetric tests such as multiple regression analysis (Hubbard, 2015) including null hypothesis significance testing. The study includes testing the research issues using survey responses of 405 CEO and chief marketing officers in 405 Hungarian firms. The study describes algorithms indicating success cases (firms) as well as failure cases via deductive, inductive, and abductive fuzzy-set logic of capabilities in context solutions.

This study examines the impact of reward practices on the relationship between an organizational strategy based on the principles of total quality management (TQM) and perceptions of firm performance. Major findings include: higher levels of firm performance were significantly correlated with greater use of TQM practices, but not with greater use of quality rhetoric in either formal strategic documents or informal strategic discussions; the use of extrinsic reward practices – including profit sharing, gainsharing, employment security, and comp time – exhibited a significantly positive moderating effect on the relationship between TQM and perceived firm performance. Regarding implications for practitioners, it is insufficient to include quality rhetoric in the formal and informal strategy. As the anecdotal literature has often advocated, the current research provides empirical support that management must “walk the talk” with regard to TQM efforts. Further, in order to realize even higher levels of firm performance, an organization should utilize reward practices which specifically complement its TQM‐based strategy.

Driven by the growing pressure to justify the contributions of marketing activities, marketers have shown considerable interest in improving their marketing performance measurement systems (MPMSs). The purpose of this study is to examine the neglected mediating effect of marketing capabilities on the MPMS–firm performance relationship and to focus on specific aspects of MPMSs that have been largely omitted in the prior research, namely, the comprehensiveness and uses of MPMSs.

A survey was conducted with marketing and senior managers from 210 Irish-based companies. The proposed research model was tested by using the SPSS Process macro and structural equation modeling in AMOS 24.

The three characteristics of MPMSs influence firm performance in different manners: while the diagnostic use of MPMSs hinders the development of market-linking capability and thus negatively influences firm performance; the comprehensiveness of MPMSs positively influences firm performance through its impact on architectural marketing capability; and the interactive use of MPMSs via externally focused learning and market-linking capabilities.

Although this study used objective firm performance data to validate subjective data, the use of single-informant and self-reported measures may still be a concern, as the strong relationships between variables may be because of single-informant bias.

This study provides insights into how companies can use a comprehensive MPMS to cultivate specific crucial marketing capabilities and thereby enhance firm performance.

This study contributes to the marketing performance measurement literature by proposing and empirically validating the mediating effect of marketing capabilities on the MPMS–firm performance relationship.