Strategic Agility and Success Perception of Polish SMEs: An Alternative Operationalization to Pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 Business Conditions

The main purpose of this chapter is to present and discuss two elements influencing the success of Polish SMEs: perceived environmental hostility and strategic agility. An alternative operationalization of strategic agility (compared to our two previous studies: Sikora, Baranowska-Prokop, The role of strategic agility and economic environment’s friendliness-hostility in explaining success of polish SMEs. In: Tsounis N, Vlachvei A (eds) Advances in longitudinal data methods in applied economic research. Springer proceedings in business and economics. Springer, pp 267–284, 2021; Sikora, Baranowska-Prokop, Strategic agility and economic environment’s friendliness-hostility in explaining success of polish SMEs in the phase of COVID-19 pandemic. In: Tsounis N, Vlachvei A (eds) Advances in quantitative economic research. Springer proceedings in business and economics, pp 477–496, 2022) is proposed, based on the EMICO (or entrepreneurial marketing) scale (Fiore et al, J Mar Dev Comp 7(4):63–86, 2013). Environmental friendliness-hostility has been operationalized as the properties of the external (or macro) environment in which firms operate as perceived by respondents. Data analysis is based on two samples of Polish SMEs: a “pre-COVID-19” sample (data collected in 2019) and a “COVID-19” sample (data collected at the turn of 2020 and 2021). Results show that (when total samples are taken into account), firstly, strategic agility was significantly and positively related to two out of three market performance measures for the “pre-COVID-19” sample and to one out of three measures for the “COVID-19” sample, secondly, external environment friendliness – hostility was not significantly related to any of the measures of market performance, however, it played a moderating role between strategic agility and market performance. This hypothesized moderating role implied that the more hostile the external environment the stronger the positive relationship between strategic agility and market performance. Results for the “pre-COVID-19” sample are not in line with this hypothesis, because positive and significant relationships between strategic agility and most of the market performance measures have been only found in the case of companies operating in a friendly environment, but for those doing business in neutral or hostile environments. Results for the “COVID-19” sample seem to support the moderation hypothesis. Weak positive and significant relationships between strategic agility and most of the market performance measures have been found for the companies operating in a friendly-to-neutral environment, and not for those doing business in a very friendly environment. In general, strategic agility is in all but one case either positively related to market performance measures or positive relationships are not significant which means that, in the absence of significant negative relationships, being strategically agile either helps or – “at worst cases” – causes no harm to enterprises’ performance.