Competitive Aggressiveness, Environmental Context, and Small Firm Performance

Abstract

This study examined relationships between firm performance, the degree of aggressiveness a firm exhibits in its competitive orientation, and the environmental dimensions of technological sophistication and hostility. Subgroup (correlation) analysis was used to analyze data collected from 143 small manufacturing-based firms. The findings suggest that high-performing firms often exhibit an aggressive competitive orientation when faced with environmental hostility, while low-performing firms tend to be more passive when operating in hostile environments. No overall difference was observed in the correlations between competitive aggressiveness and environmental technological sophistication for the high- and low-performing subgroups. However, younger firms generally performed better when they were not highly aggressive in technologically sophisticated environments.

Unraveling the attitudes on entrepreneurial universities: The case of Croatian and Spanish universities

“…Other similar scales have been used in several studies Slevin, 1986, 1989;Covin and Covin, 1990) for measuring the entrepreneurial orientation in the context of business organizations.…”

A socioemotional wealth perspective on innovativeness and performance of family businesses.

“…The most studied factors include environmental factors such as environmental dynamism and munificence/hostility (Covin and Covin, 1990). However, as discussed in more detail in section 1.1, these factors will not be included in the research model but will instead be controlled because the focus of this dissertation is to understand the family influences on innovativeness and financial performance of family firms.…”

“…The scope of this dissertation however, is limited to family influences on innovativeness that have been described as in need of further research examination (Basco and Rodriguez, 2009;Berrone et al, 2012). As a result, any environmental factors that could possibly affect the innovative efforts of family businesses, including environmental munificence/hostility (Covin and Covin, 1990) and environmental dynamism (Miller and Friesen, 1982) are controlled.…”

“…Therefore, environmental munificence/hostility as well as environmental dynamism was controlled using the measures by (Covin and Covin, 1990) and (Miller and Friesen, 1982), respectively.…”

International Journal of Business and Management, Vol. 4, No. 9, September 2009, all in one PDF file

“…This study explored Bumiputera SMEs entrepreneurial orientation (EO) as one of the entrepreneurship strategy to enhance the performance (Hitt, Ireland & Hoskisson, 2003;Miller, 1983;Wheelen & Hunger, 2002). The dimensions of EO in this study was the firm-level construct adopted from Khandwalla, (1977), Miller and Friesen (1982), Miller (1983), Covin and Slevin (1989), Stevenson and Jarillo (1990), Covin and Covin, (1990), Naman and Slevin (1993), Lumpkin and Dess (1996), and Miles, Covin and Heeley, (2000).…”