Entrepreneurial talent and venture performance: A meta-analytic investigation of SMEs

By Katrin Mayer-Haug, Stuart Read, J. Brinckmann, Nicholas Dew, Dietmar Grichnik. 2013

159 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As the broad link between small and medium-sized firm activity and key policy goals such as employment or economic growth has become generally accepted, the conversation has focused on a more nuanced understanding of the entrepreneurial engines of economic activity. A significant body of research looking at antecedents to venture performance has identified that entrepreneurial talent variables account for meaningful differences in venture performance and that significant heterogeneity exists across performance measures. These are important issues for institutions and policy makers seeking to achieve specific economic goals (e.g., survival or growth of ventures, employment or revenue). Using meta-analysis, we integrate this work to view connections between aspects of entrepreneurial talent and different performance outcomes. Our investigation includes 50,045 firms (K of 183 studies) and summarizes 1002 observations of small and medium-sized firms. Analysis of these data yields an unexpectedly weak connection between education and performance. Furthermore, growth, scale (number of employees) and sales outcomes are significantly related to planning skills, while profit and other financial and qualitative measures are strongly connected with the network surrounding the firm founders. Moreover, we observe that entrepreneurial talent is more relevant in developing economies.

Subfields: Accounting, Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a6958aca53489940300026779177101a73336285

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Citations in the corpus

Inter-organizational collaboration and SMEs’ innovation: A systematic review and future research directions (2020, methodology): “This size limit for SMEs has been used by previous researchers in the innovation management domain (Klewitz & Hansen, 2014; Mayer-Haug et al., 2013).”
ESG and financial performance: aggregated evidence from more than 2000 empirical studies (2015, background): “…del Mar Miras-Rodríguez et al. (2015) E, S 91 31.878 0.067 Dixon-Fowler et al. (2013) E 39 22.869 0.062 Golicic and Smith (2013) E 31 15.160 0.305 Mayer-Haug et al. (2013) S 58 50.045 0.044(b) Endrikat, Guenther, and Hoppe (2014) E 148 201.511 0.082(b) Stam, Arzlanian, and Elfring (2014) S 43…”
Innovation and business performance for Spanish SMEs: New evidence from a multi-dimensional approach (2018, background): “Managers characterised by innovation and with an appetite for risk promote innovation and ventures in their business in order to outperform counterparts (Kraus et al., 2012; Mayer-Haug et al., 2013).”
Get It Together! Synergistic Effects of Causal and Effectual Decision-Making Logics on Venture Performance (2018, background): “continued need for future studies reflecting on what the appropriate dependent variable for effectuation research ought to be (McKelvie et al., 2013). Third, more research is needed to further distinguish the concept of effectuation from other entrepreneurial behaviors like bricolage (Baker & Nelson”
Entrepreneurial passion diversity in new venture teams: An empirical examination of short- and long-term performance implications (2020, background): “After decades of scholarly focus on the more rational determinants of new venture performance (Mayer-Haug et al., 2013; Song et al., 2008; Unger et al., 2011), feelings and emotions have increasingly become recognized as being inherent to entrepreneurial endeavors and as key drivers of new venture…”
Emergence of entrepreneurial behaviour: The role of age-based self-image (2015, background): “Although mixed evidence exists on the influence of education, research suggests that higher education tends to help individuals to explore and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities (Mayer-Haug et al., 2013), thus serving as an important driver of entrepreneurial behaviour (Davidsson & Honig, 2003).”