IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/cejnor/v24y2016i4d10.1007_s10100-015-0408-5.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The effects of top management team composition on SME export performance: an upper echelons perspective

Author

Listed:
  • F. Pinar Acar

    (Orta Doǧu Teknik Üniversitesi)

Abstract

Survival of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) increasingly depends on their ability to exploit opportunities in foreign markets. Given their limited resources, exporting is one of the most viable modes of entry into foreign markets for SMEs. The present study is an attempt to contribute to the research that identifies the factors associated with SME export performance. Specifically, the association between top management team demographic composition and SME export performance was examined in an emerging market context and drawing from upper echelons perspective. Focusing on such commonly examined upper echelons attributes as age, education level, and tenure, the present research assessed whether top management team composition distinguished between SMEs in terms of their export levels. Data were collected from 128 SMEs operating in Ankara and Bursa regions of Turkey. Results obtained by a hierarchical regression analysis indicated that SMEs with lower mean industry tenure and higher age separation diversity had higher levels of export performance.

Suggested Citation

  • F. Pinar Acar, 2016. "The effects of top management team composition on SME export performance: an upper echelons perspective," Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer;Slovak Society for Operations Research;Hungarian Operational Research Society;Czech Society for Operations Research;Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR);Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research;Croatian Operational Research Society, vol. 24(4), pages 833-852, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:cejnor:v:24:y:2016:i:4:d:10.1007_s10100-015-0408-5
    DOI: 10.1007/s10100-015-0408-5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10100-015-0408-5
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10100-015-0408-5?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mike Wright & Paul Westhead & Deniz Ucbasaran, 2007. "Internationalization of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and International Entrepreneurship: A Critique and Policy Implications," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 41(7), pages 1013-1030.
    2. Deborah Dougherty, 1992. "Interpretive Barriers to Successful Product Innovation in Large Firms," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 3(2), pages 179-202, May.
    3. Harry G. Barkema & Oleg Shvyrkov, 2007. "Does top management team diversity promote or hamper foreign expansion?," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(7), pages 663-680, July.
    4. Deborah Gladstein Ancona & David F. Caldwell, 1992. "Demography and Design: Predictors of New Product Team Performance," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 3(3), pages 321-341, August.
    5. Donald C. Hambrick, 1989. "Guest editor's introduction: Putting top managers back in the strategy picture," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 10(S1), pages 5-15, June.
    6. Shaker Zahra & Donald Neubaum & Lucia Naldi, 2007. "The Effects of Ownership and Governance on SMEs’ International Knowledge-based Resources," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 29(3), pages 309-327, October.
    7. Igor Filatotchev & Xiaohui Liu & Trevor Buck & Mike Wright, 2009. "The export orientation and export performance of high-technology SMEs in emerging markets: The effects of knowledge transfer by returnee entrepreneurs," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 40(6), pages 1005-1021, August.
    8. Claude L Simpson & Duane Kujawa, 1974. "The Export Decision Process: An Empirical Inquiry," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 5(1), pages 107-117, March.
    9. Morten Huse, 2000. "Boards of directors in SMEs: a review and research agenda," Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 12(4), pages 271-290, October.
    10. Mike Wright & Igor Filatotchev & Robert E. Hoskisson & Mike W. Peng, 2005. "Strategy Research in Emerging Economies: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 42(1), pages 1-33, January.
    11. Lisa Hope Pelled, 1996. "Demographic Diversity, Conflict, and Work Group Outcomes: An Intervening Process Theory," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 7(6), pages 615-631, December.
    12. Stasser, Garold & Vaughan, Sandra I. & Stewart, Dennis D., 2000. "Pooling Unshared Information: The Benefits of Knowing How Access to Information Is Distributed among Group Members," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 82(1), pages 102-116, May.
    13. Musteen, Martina & Francis, John & Datta, Deepak K., 2010. "The influence of international networks on internationalization speed and performance: A study of Czech SMEs," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 45(3), pages 197-205, July.
    14. Patricia Pitcher & Anne D. Smith, 2001. "Top Management Team Heterogeneity: Personality, Power, and Proxies," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 12(1), pages 1-18, February.
    15. S. Tamer Cavusgil, 1984. "Organizational Characteristics Associated With Export Activity," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 21(1), pages 3-22, January.
    16. M. Lopez-Perez & Lazaro Rodriguez-Ariza, 2013. "Ownership and trust in the governance structures of Spanish-Moroccan SMEs constituted as international joint ventures," Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer;Slovak Society for Operations Research;Hungarian Operational Research Society;Czech Society for Operations Research;Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR);Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research;Croatian Operational Research Society, vol. 21(3), pages 609-624, September.
    17. Petrit Gashi & Iraj Hashi & Geoff Pugh, 2014. "Export behaviour of SMEs in transition countries," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 42(2), pages 407-435, February.
    18. Karen A. Bantel & Susan E. Jackson, 1989. "Top management and innovations in banking: Does the composition of the top team make a difference?," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 10(S1), pages 107-124, June.
    19. Barbara S. Lawrence, 1997. "Perspective---The Black Box of Organizational Demography," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 8(1), pages 1-22, February.
    20. A Rebecca Reuber & Eileen Fischer, 1997. "The Influence of the Management Team’s International Experience on the Internationalization Behaviors of SMES," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 28(4), pages 807-825, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stephanie E. Mansion & Andreas Bausch, 2020. "Intangible assets and SMEs’ export behavior: a meta-analytical perspective," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 55(3), pages 727-760, October.
    2. Jannika Kutzschbach & Parvina Tanikulova & Rainer Lueg, 2021. "The Role of Top Managers in Implementing Corporate Sustainability—A Systematic Literature Review on Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises," Administrative Sciences, MDPI, vol. 11(2), pages 1-19, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Stefano Denicolai & Birgit Hagen & Alessia Pisoni, 2015. "Be international or be innovative? Be both? The role of the entrepreneurial profile," Journal of International Entrepreneurship, Springer, vol. 13(4), pages 390-417, December.
    2. Ilya R. P. Cuypers & Charmi Patel & Gokhan Ertug & Jiatao Li & Youtha Cuypers, 2022. "Top management teams in international business research: A review and suggestions for future research," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 53(3), pages 481-515, April.
    3. Michaela Wrede & Tobias Dauth, 2020. "A temporal perspective on the relationship between top management team internationalization and firms' innovativeness," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(4), pages 542-561, June.
    4. Yucheng Ma & Changwei Pang & Haowen Chen & Nan Chi & Yuan Li, 2014. "Interdisciplinary Cooperation and Knowledge Creation Quality: A Perspective of Recombinatory Search," Systems Research and Behavioral Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(1), pages 115-126, January.
    5. Hessels, Jolanda & Parker, Simon C., 2013. "Constraints, internationalization and growth: A cross-country analysis of European SMEs," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 137-148.
    6. Frances Fabian & Henry Molina & Giuseppe Labianca, 2009. "Understanding Decisions to Internationalize by Small and Medium-sized Firms Located in an Emerging Market," Management International Review, Springer, vol. 49(5), pages 537-563, October.
    7. Ray Reagans & Ezra W. Zuckerman, 2001. "Networks, Diversity, and Productivity: The Social Capital of Corporate R&D Teams," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 12(4), pages 502-517, August.
    8. Juan Pablo Diánez-González & Carmen Camelo-Ordaz, 2016. "How management team composition affects academic spin-offs’ entrepreneurial orientation: the mediating role of conflict," The Journal of Technology Transfer, Springer, vol. 41(3), pages 530-557, June.
    9. Pier Vittorio Mannucci, 2017. "Drawing Snow White and Animating Buzz Lightyear: Technological Toolkit Characteristics and Creativity in Cross-Disciplinary Teams," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 28(4), pages 711-728, August.
    10. Bianchi, Constanza & Wickramasekera, Rumintha, 2016. "Antecedents of SME export intensity in a Latin American Market," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 69(10), pages 4368-4376.
    11. Tine Buyl & Christophe Boone & Walter Hendriks & Paul Matthyssens, 2011. "Top Management Team Functional Diversity and Firm Performance: The Moderating Role of CEO Characteristics," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(1), pages 151-177, January.
    12. van den Oever, Koen, 2017. "Uncharted waters : A behavioral approach to when, why and which organizational changes are adopted," Other publications TiSEM 0136c8c2-ecdd-4f82-8ca7-d, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    13. Martineau, Charles & Pastoriza, David, 2016. "International involvement of established SMEs: A systematic review of antecedents, outcomes and moderators," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 25(2), pages 458-470.
    14. van den Oever, Koen & Beerens, Bart, 2021. "Does task-related conflict mediate the board gender diversity–organizational performance relationship?," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 39(4), pages 445-455.
    15. Paul, Justin & Parthasarathy, Sundar & Gupta, Parul, 2017. "Exporting challenges of SMEs: A review and future research agenda," Journal of World Business, Elsevier, vol. 52(3), pages 327-342.
    16. Ho‐Uk Lee & Jong‐Hun Park, 2008. "The Influence of Top Management Team International Exposure on International Alliance Formation," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(5), pages 961-981, July.
    17. Hutzschenreuter, Thomas & Horstkotte, Julian, 2013. "Performance effects of international expansion processes: The moderating role of top management team experiences," International Business Review, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 259-277.
    18. Sonja Sperber & Christian Linder, 2018. "The impact of top management teams on firm innovativeness: a configurational analysis of demographic characteristics, leadership style and team power distribution," Review of Managerial Science, Springer, vol. 12(1), pages 285-316, January.
    19. Andreea N. Kiss & Dirk Libaers & Pamela S. Barr & Tang Wang & Miles A. Zachary, 2020. "CEO cognitive flexibility, information search, and organizational ambidexterity," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 41(12), pages 2200-2233, December.
    20. de Vet, A.J., 2007. "The effects of thinking in silence on creativity and innovation," Other publications TiSEM 75a9cbd3-19ab-4f82-ad2f-5, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:cejnor:v:24:y:2016:i:4:d:10.1007_s10100-015-0408-5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.