BRQ Business Research Quarterly

Using the resource-based view of the firm, this article examines how different resources are used by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in response to environmental uncertainty in an emerging market context. A survey was conducted involving 212 owners, CEOs, or managing directors of SMEs in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to explore the drivers of firm growth strategies. Our empirical results show that higher environmental uncertainty, in terms of market and regulatory uncertainty, drives SMEs to pursue a more exploratory instead of an exploitative growth strategy. Our results also show that SMEs pursuing more of an exploratory growth strategy focus predominantly on intangible resources such as human capital and social capital while firms pursuing more of an exploitative growth strategy focus more on financial resources. The results from our study provide valuable insights for how managers can structure, bundle, and leverage different resources for developing their strategies based on their level of perceived environmental uncertainty. The policy implications from our study are that support for SMEs should be multi-faceted depending on the combination of uncertainty faced and type of strategy chosen by SMEs.

JEL CLASSIFICATION: M10; M19; M13

Theoretical debate suggests at least three strategies for firms to provide training to employees in the same job position: individualized and egalitarian with or without adaptation to the abilities of the recruited employees. The article provides a formal framework for deriving distinctive empirical implications regarding the relationship of these strategies with the firms’ selection policies, which are tested using a dataset of blue-collar workers in Spanish industrial plants. The evidence is consistent with the empirical implications of the egalitarian strategy with adaptation. This strategy entails providing the same level of training to all workers in the same job position and setting this level according to the average ability of recruited workers. Paradoxically, this strategy has not been used to interpret the results of the existing empirical literature.

This article investigates the influence of specific key organizational factors (i.e., enabling formalization, coercive formalization, and trust) as antecedents of ambidexterity. Moreover, we propose a new way of operationalizing ambidexterity, under a holistic vision, including the synergies between exploration and exploitation. The study has been developed in the Spanish organic agro-food industry; a total of 239 usable responses were received from two respondents from each company—the general manager and the quality manager. The findings show that enabling formalization and organizational trust are positively related to ambidexterity, but contrary to our predictions, we found no evidence to show that coercive formalization is related to ambidexterity. In turn, we found different results for trust as a moderating factor on the types of formalization and ambidexterity.

This article attempts to identify the default risk measure which best reflects the idiosyncratic context of public family firms. Seven accounting- and market-based measures are compared over a sample of 981 US family and non-family firms for the period 2000–2016. The results show that the Black–Scholes–Merton (BSM) measure gives the best fit in both types of firm. However, all the accounting-based measures, especially Altman’s Z-score, come closest to the market-based measures when used to assess the credit risk of family firms. The two types of measures also coincide more closely in their default risk orderings of family than of non-family firms. Useful practical implications can be drawn from these findings, which show that accounting-based measures can be used reliably in the absence of market data for family firms with similar characteristics to those in our sample.

JEL CLASSIFICATION: G32; G33; G13; C52; M21; M41

New challenges arise in data visualization when the research involves a sizable database. With many data points, classical scatterplots are non-informative due to the cluttering of points. On the contrary, simple plots, such as the boxplot that are of limited use in small samples, offer great potential to facilitate group comparison in the case of an extensive sample. This article presents exploratory data analysis methods useful for inspecting variation across groups in crucial variables and detecting heterogeneity. The exploratory data analysis methods (introduced by Tukey in his seminal book of 1977) encompass a set of statistical tools aimed to extract information from data using simple graphical tools. In this article, some of the exploratory data analysis methods like the boxplot and scatterplot are revisited and enhanced using modern graphical computational devices (as, for example, the heat-map) and their use illustrated with Spanish Social Security data. We explore how earnings vary across several factors like age, gender, type of occupation, and contract, and in particular, the gender gap in salaries is visualized in various dimensions relating to the type of occupation. The exploratory data analysis methods are also applied to assessing and refining competing regressions by plotting residuals-versus-fitted values. The methods discussed should be useful to researchers to assess heterogeneity in data, across-group variation, and classical diagnostic plots of residuals from alternative models fits.

JEL CLASSIFICATION: C55; J01; J08; Y10; C80