Today, knowledge is the most crucial element to stimulate organizational competitiveness and economic development. The ability of a firm to quickly recognize, assimilate, and utilize external... Show moreToday, knowledge is the most crucial element to stimulate organizational competitiveness and economic development. The ability of a firm to quickly recognize, assimilate, and utilize external knowledge is one of the core capabilities that bring organizational competitive advantages. Such an ability is called absorptive capacity (AC). This study focuses on three AC-related topics in the context of Chinese SMEs: 1) How do SMEs absorb external knowledge in terms of its recognition, assimilation, and utilization? 2) What challenges do SMEs face when absorbing external knowledge? And, 3)Which knowledge assimilation mechanisms do have an impact on the performance of SMEs? Show less
The literature suggests many different variables that may explain rule violations by companies. These can be categorized into variables at the industry level, such as the degree of rule violations,... Show moreThe literature suggests many different variables that may explain rule violations by companies. These can be categorized into variables at the industry level, such as the degree of rule violations, at the company level, such as the organizational culture, and at the individual level, such as personal or social norms. From the Dutch Tax Administration’s (2009) registration data, industries were selected with relatively low and relatively high tax correction rates. Within these industries, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with 20–150 employees were selected that either had received no (or negative) corrections or had received large positive corrections, resulting in a population of 1558 companies. In 194 of these SMEs, both the director and an employee were interviewed about violations of administrative, environmental and tax obligations, about their personal motives and about the ethical organizational culture. The results of the study show that all three levels of variables explain intentions to comply or to violate the rules. Ethical culture contributes to explaining the compliance intentions of both directors and employees. However, in contrast to previous research, about half of the SMEs cannot be characterized by a coherent ethical culture. Show less
