This article aims to examine how certain economic and social factors influence short-and long-term performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). SMEs' performance is defined by using the value added (VA) by SMEs, as a percent of the total VA by enterprises. The study targets European Union (EU) countries selected by the authors following a cluster analysis procedure. In order to obtain short-and long-term influences, an analysis that carries out three types of tests is conducted: testing stationarity, testing cointegration and testing causality between the indicators identified as influencing factors and the variable measuring the performance of SMEs. The novelty and originality of this research are defined in terms of addressing the performance of SMEs from a new perspective, using an econometric basis in a macroeconomic view. From an econometric perspective, the results are among the most varied, both in the long-and short-term, however they also have a correspondent economic explanation.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Despite the increasing emphasis placed on knowledge management (KM) by the business sector and the common belief that creating, acquiring, sharing, and the use of knowledge enable individuals, teams, and communities to achieve superior performance, within the healthcare context, there is still room from improvements from both the theoretical and empirical perspectives. The purpose of this paper is to outline the contribution of KM process to the social- and economic-related outcomes in the context of health organizations. Given the theoretical approach on the considered concepts and their relationships, a conceptual model and seven research hypotheses were proposed. The empirical data were provided by a cross-sectional investigation including 459 medical and nonmedical employees of Romanian heath organizations, selected by a mixed method sampling procedure. A partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach was selected to provide information on the relevance and significance of the first- and second-order constructs, test the hypotheses, and conduct an importance performance matrix analysis. The PLS-SEM estimation showed positive and significant relationships between KM process and quality of healthcare, and organizational-level social and economic outcomes. Moreover, the research results provided evidences for the complex complementary mediation of the quality of healthcare and social-related outcomes on the relationships between KM process and social and economic outcomes. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided at the end of the paper.
Over the last decades, around the world, the concept of competitiveness was long debated by economists (and others), widely used and even sometimes overused. Although at the theoretical level, a number of determinant factors of health care organizations' competitiveness have been proposed, their diversity and the little empirical data available argues for the need to create and validate a model of competitiveness of health organizations. The purpose of this paper is (considering the theoretical approach) to shape a model of sustainable competitiveness of health organizations. In this respect, a 51 item questionnaire was designed and applied on a sample of 291 respondents from 12 Romanian health organizations. The exploratory factor analysis undertaken recovered more than 69% of the common variability of the initial 51 variables and revealed four factors/dimensions of sustainable competitiveness of health organizations (Economic Dimension, Quality Dimension, Social Dimension, and Strategic Dimension). Among the results of the exploratory factor analysis is also the empirical evidence on the contribution of leadership and managerial processes to enhance the influence of all other factors/dimensions in increasing the sustainable competitiveness of health organizations, thus bringing into focus the concept of sustainable management and leadership. Being just in the exploratory phase of our research, the proposed model can, and should, be improved, thus opening up further research directions.
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