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

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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.