Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to analyse generational differences with regard to honest behaviour and honesty as a personal value in post-Soviet business environment: in Estonia and Latvia.
Design/methodology/approach
In total, 781 service employees from six retail organizations in Estonia and Latvia were surveyed to assess likelihood of dishonest behaviour and to rank their values according to the Rokeach instrumental value scale.
Findings
Older generations report higher likelihood of honest behaviour than younger generations. Post-war and early generation X, born between 1945 and 1970, also rate honesty and responsibility higher as their individual values.
Originality/value
The complexity of generational differences in ethical behaviour and honesty as a personal value has not been widely researched in post-Soviet business environment.
Small businesses play a vital role in small economies. According to Eurostat, 99.8% of businesses in Latvia are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), creating 79% of jobs and 70% of gross added value [1]. Thus, their ability to create value and to sustain competitive advantage through innovation is essential for economic development and growth. Yet many small businesses might face challenges of limited capacity, personnel and insufficient resources for long-term investments in research and development. And, besides the lack of resources, such businesses might not see the benefits of innovation. Implementation of organizational innovation could provide them a way to improve competitiveness and also become a stepping stone to foster other types of innovation. The purpose of this study is to analyze the effects of organizational culture (OC) on organizational innovation in SMEs via an empirical study of businesses from various industries. The study assesses four dimensions of the OC adopted from Denison and Spreitzer (1991)-Team, Development, Result-orientation and Consistency [2]. And it evaluates the impact of the OC on product, process, marketing and organizational innovation performance in selected companies. The study confirms that OC and innovation indicators are closely related. Stronger and more developed OC in any of the four aforementioned dimensions leads to better innovation performance. This relation is particularly strong for organizational innovation, thus the impact is further analyzed using a regression model. This study finds Development-orientation and Consistency as the most significant factors, explaining 44.6% of the total variation in the organizational innovation performance. This study contributes to research on small and medium-sized business innovation.
Innovations can provide small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) a significant competitive advantage considering the ambiguous business environment. SMEs may face lower capacity and more constrained funding for long-term investments, however, understanding innovation in a broader sense and looking into organizational structures, behaviors and processes, SMEs have an opportunity to become more competitive. This study analyzes the impact of ethical behavior as a part of an organizational culture on organizational innovation performance in SMEs. Six hundred SMEs in Latvia were surveyed to assess whether employees follow the principles of business ethics in their work and what is the organizational innovation performance in these enterprises. We found that more ethical behavior leads to better organizational innovation performance, and that the size of enterprise is the most significant factor affecting this relationship. The study proposes insights that contribute to theoretical and practical discussions on fostering small businesses innovation in small economies.
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