Strategic Planning and Performance of SMEs: The Moderating Impact of National Culture and Organizational Boundary Factors.

尽管进行了大量研究，但关于战略规划与中小企业业绩之间关系的经验结论仍然没有定论。从不同国家获得的不确定结论表明，战略规划与业绩之间的关系，除其他外，取决于审查重点关系的国家背景。本项目的总体目标是通过将战略规划与中小企业绩效的关系联系起来，调和关于战略规划对中小企业业绩的作用的对立论点。为此，我们试图介绍中小企业所处的国家文化背景以及民族文化发挥作用的组织边界因素。我们试图通过对至少12个国家(澳大利亚、奥地利、智利、中国、德国、印度、新加坡、西班牙、南非、瑞士、英国、美国)中代表不同民族文化和发展阶段的中小企业的(部分二元)调查数据，对我们的理论预测进行实证验证。我们的研究项目寻求在三个主要方面为现存的文学做出贡献。首先，我们通过开始调和现存的相互矛盾的论点和发现，对有关中小企业战略规划和企业绩效之间关系的文献做出了贡献。其次，我们通过理论论证和实证验证来推进文献，在哪种组织环境下，民族文化的影响最大。第三，拟议的研究有助于解决跨文化管理的方法论问题，并弥补了现有跨文化研究中一些重要而普遍的缺陷，限制了它们的稳健性。

Despite considerable research empirical findings on the relationship between strategic planning and performance of SMEs remain inconclusive. The inconclusive findings obtained from different nations suggest that the relationship between strategic planning and performance is, amongst others, dependent on the national context in which the focal relationship is examined. The overall aim of the present project is to reconcile opposing arguments on strategic planning's role for the performance of SMEs by contextualizing the relationship. To this end, we seek to introduce the national cultural setting in which the SME operates as well as the organizational boundary factors of national culture's role. We seek to empirically validate our theoretical predictions by means of (partly dyadic) survey data from SMEs in at least twelve nations representing different national cultures and development stages of countries (Australia, Austria, Chile, China, Germany, India, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Switzerland, UK, US). Our research project seeks to contribute to extant literature in three major ways. First, we contribute to the literature on the relationship between strategic planning and firm performance in SMEs by beginning to reconcile extant contradictory arguments and findings. Second, we advance the literature by theoretically deriving arguments and empirically validating under which organizational circumstances the impact of national culture is strongest. Third, the proposed research contributes to methodological issues in cross-cultural management and accommodates some important and widespread weaknesses of existing cross-cultural studies limiting their robustness.