Exploring the link, among small firms, between management training and firm performance: a comparison between the UK and other OECD countries
By D. Storey. 2004
280 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Small firms are much less likely than large firms to provide their employees and their managers with formal training. Storey and Westhead offer two explanations of this, which they refer to as the ‘ignorance’ explanation and the ‘market’ explanation. This paper reviews recent research findings that increasingly point towards support for the ‘market’ over the ‘ignorance’ explanation. While it has a policy interest in the UK, the paper draws comparisons with five other OECD countries: Canada, Finland, Germany, Japan and the USA. The paper shows that there is ambiguity in the evidence relating management training to small firm performance. When the views of trainees are sought, public programmes appear to be well received. However, econometric methods linking training participation to small firm performance produce weak findings. This suggests that the relatively low take up of formal management training is an informed decision on the part of the small firm owner/manager. It implies that seeking to increase formal small firm training activity by raising the awareness of owners/managers to the benefits of training is misguided.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ea1269130265a5d6270c8c3012826f1a116a17de
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Citations in the corpus
- Training and Performance: The Mediating Role of Organizational Learning (2014, unknown): “Storey (2004) names this type of training ‘‘formal’’, in contrast with ‘‘informal’’ training that is not structured.”
- Formal Development Opportunities and Withdrawal Behaviors by Employees in Small and Medium‐Sized Enterprises (2010, methodology): “…does not appear to be a universally agreed definition and measure of formal training and development in SMEs, we drew upon the approach taken by Storey (2004) and emphasized the planned, structured, and delimited nature of the activity so as to clearly distinguish formal training and…”
- Founders’ human capital and the performance of UK new technology based firms (2012, background): “Overall, it can be expected that when an EFT starts a company, the levels of performance will be higher than those of a company run by a single entrepreneur (Almus 2002; Storey 2004).”
- HRM in the SME sector: valuable employees and coercive networks (2005, background): “Moreover, despite scepticism that a link exists between HRM and the economic performance of SMEs (Storey, 2004), recent evidence indicates that the few SMEs that have adopted more sophisticated HRM practices do report superior performance (Hayton, 2003; Way, 2002).”
- Human resource practices, employee attitudes and small firm performance (2017, unknown): “However, evidence also shows that employees in small businesses are less likely to have access to structured training provision than employees of large firms (Storey, 2004; Storey and Westhead, 1997).”
- Export propensity, export intensity and firm performance: The role of the entrepreneurial founding team (2012, background): “It is therefore suggested that ETBFs formed by an entrepreneurial team rather than a lone entrepreneur will reach higher levels of performance (Oakey, 2003; Storey, 2004).”
- Training commitment and performance in manufacturing SMEs: Incidence, intensity and approaches (2007, background): “In particular, there are a multitude of other external and internal variables that put weight into the training-performance relationship ( Storey, 2004”
- Employee perceptions of their workplaces as learning environments (2007, unknown): “other developed economies (Storey, 2004; Field, 1998).”