Purpose: Miles and Snow's conception of strategic types is the most popular and extensively studied typology of strategic choices. Consequently, in recent years it has been related to organizational performance measures. Despite numerous studies conducted in different environmental and organizational settings, the research results of relationships between strategic types and organizational performance are ambiguous. In this paper, we seek to advance the knowledge regarding how a chosen strategic type affects organizational performance measures in the transition economy of Poland.Methodology: Using quantitative research results, on the basis of data from 96 organizations we statistically test four research hypotheses. Findings:Research results reveal the existence of "clear" strategic types in majority of companies but highlight moderately strong relationships between declared strategic type and organizational performance. In turn, they suggest that Prospector and Analyzer strategic types promise slightly higher performance than Reactor and Defender types.Originality: This research project on strategic types in SMEs in a transition economy is one of few dealing with this topic that have been conducted in Eastern European countries to date.

Familiness, perceived as family members' involvement in and influence on the functioning of the family business, constitutes the distinguishing feature of every family firm. In the paper, we empirically test the relationships between familiness, innovation input and output and organizational performance in a post‐transition economy using data from 200 Polish family firms. Our research results reveal that high levels of ownership, management and control of the firm by the family members, perceived as part of familiness, lead to increased firm performance. Second, results show that the increase in the degree of familiness lowers the innovation input. We also found out that increases in the transgenerational orientation of a family business and family–employee bonds lead to decreased innovation output and higher family business identity generate higher innovation output.

Motivation: Organizational resilience, understood as an ability to survive in harsh market conditions, captures increased research consideration in recent years. The same applies to family businesses that attracted significant attention lately. Although the interest in the topic grows, there are still remaining questions to be answered. Aim: In the paper we focus on identifying factors affecting organizational abilities to adapt to dynamic, hostile and complex environment especially when disruptive events occur in the environment. Literature studies in the topic allowed development of research proposition-organizational resilience should help to survive negative occurrences in the environment and family business should focus their attention on building resilience capacity while it may allow and facilitate longevity and well-being of an organization. Results: We illustrate this proposition with the use of two family company cases from the Silesian Voivodeship. The first is a case of a large production company that existed between 2000 and 2013, and after receiving increased growth in 2005-2012 period it went bankrupt in 2014 after two large contracts. The second is a case of a developer company from the same region that started its operation in the same period and managed to develop both its market and products in years. We compare the data flowing from interviews with the owners (that are also managers of these companies) using Eisenhardt methodology and that leads to creation of propositions for future research. Research results indicate ORIGINAL ARTICLE

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Considering the impacts of the most recent global economic crisis in 2008/2009, this paper explores how firm size, type of business activity and approach to internationalisation influence SMEs’ survival. Based on the literature in the field, we developed three hypotheses regarding determinants of Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) survival. We tested these hypotheses in a 7-year quantitative study and a survey of 344 SMEs in Poland – the seventh largest market in the European Union. Our findings reveal that, in the context of crisis, internationalisation acts as a stimulus for SMEs and influences their long-term sustainability, with businesses operating in foreign markets being more likely to survive after a global crisis. However, neither business size nor the type of business activity appears to have an impact on SMEs’ survival in a post-global economic crisis environment. Our paper extends knowledge about factors influencing a firm’s post-crisis survival and proposes a new framework for understanding characteristics of SMEs and their propensity to survive in a post-crisis context. In our conclusions, we discuss implications for SME entrepreneurs showing that, in order to enhance chances of survival, even small and medium enterprises should consider expanding business activities beyond their national markets.