IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/prbchp/978-3-030-98179-2_33.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Strategic Agility and Economic Environment’s Friendliness-Hostility in Explaining Performance of Polish SMEs in the Phase of COVID-19 Pandemic

In: Advances in Quantitative Economic Research

Author

Listed:
  • Tomasz Sikora

    (SGH Warsaw School of Economics)

  • Ewa Baranowska-Prokop

    (SGH Warsaw School of Economics)

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to present the relationship between two factors: perceived environmental hostility (or friendliness) and strategic agility with market performance of Polish SMEs from medium-tech and high-tech industries during COVID-19 pandemic. This research directly refers to analogical study analyzing the role of the two variables in the period just before COVID-19 (Sikora & Baranowska-Prokop, Advances in longitudinal data methods in applied economic research, Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, 2021). Research results revealed that respondents interviewed during the period of entire second lockdown in December 2020–January 2021 evaluated external environment as more friendly (none of the respondents evaluated environment as “unfriendly”) compared to their pre-COVID counterparts interviewed during May–July 2019. Moreover, in contrast to the previous research, neither strategic agility nor environmental hostility–friendliness showed significant relationships with firms’ results. These unexpected findings may be explained in regards to several factors: In general, industry was hit less severely by lockdowns than services (most of respondents declared only “moderately” negative impact of COVID-19-related restrictions on the environment their firm operated and the relationship between the declared number of COVID-19 related consequences and market performance was weak). Efficacy of government’s programs within the framework of “Anti-crisis Shield” (introduced in Poland end-March 2020) providing subsidies for enterprises (to maintain financial liquidity and employment). Favorable macro-environment in which the local currency (considered as undervalued) helped both exporters making them more price-competitive and manufacturing firms operating on the local market by “insulating” them from cheaper imports. In our opinion, friendly macro-environment, availability of public assistance programs, and firms’ capability to get money from them (which need further research) were decisive factors influencing Polish firms’ performance, whereas strategic agility, as operationalized in this study and in the previous one, did not matter as significant predictor of firms’ success.

Suggested Citation

  • Tomasz Sikora & Ewa Baranowska-Prokop, 2022. "Strategic Agility and Economic Environment’s Friendliness-Hostility in Explaining Performance of Polish SMEs in the Phase of COVID-19 Pandemic," Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics, in: Nicholas Tsounis & Aspasia Vlachvei (ed.), Advances in Quantitative Economic Research, chapter 0, pages 477-496, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-030-98179-2_33
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-98179-2_33
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Strategic agility; Environmental hostility; Competitive strategies; SMEs; COVID-19 pandemic; JEL code: L11; M10; M16; M31;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • M10 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - General
    • M16 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - International Business Administration
    • M31 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Marketing and Advertising - - - Marketing

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:prbchp:978-3-030-98179-2_33. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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.