Exogenous shocks and export market portfolios of SMEs: the role of performance aspirations and organizational slack
Résumé
This research focuses on the export market portfolio, i.e. the number of export markets, of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the context of exogenous shocks. Relying on behavioral theory, we investigate the influence of performance aspiration and resource slack on export market portfolios. The empirical study is based on a longitudinal data-set of 191 French SMEs. We demonstrate that firms with lower performance than expected and high human resource slack increase their export market portfolio after the occurrence of the shock while low performance has an inverse effect after a certain period of time. Conversely, financial slack leads SMEs to decrease their export market portfolio after the occurrence of the shock and in the long term. Our findings challenge several assumptions of behavioral theory and highlight the necessity to consider temporal effects of performance aspirations and organizational slack.
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