The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on selected areas of a management system in SMEs

Abstract

The current pandemic, that has wider economic and social impacts, will put to the test all enterprises, which will be forced to search for new survival strategies and to create existential prognoses of business operations during great economic and social uncertainty and new crises whose impacts are hard to predict. This fact motivated the team of authors to realise the study that aims at researching and quantifying the impacts of the pandemic COVID-19 on selected areas of management in SMEs in the Czech Republic (CR) and the Slovak Republic (SR). The research sample consisted of 1502 SMEs, 822 SMEs before the pandemic, 680 SMEs during the pandemic, 814 from CR, and 688 from SR. Attitudes between SMEs according to nationality and period of research were verified with a chisquared test and Kruskal-Wallis tests. The results of both countries confirmed that the pandemic has a negative impact on the financial performance of SMEs. The government economic measures may help the enterprises to recover, said 40.0% of Czech entrepreneurs, but only 30% of Slovak entrepreneurs. However, the entrepreneurs in SMEs equally perceive other aspects of corporate governance and business risk management during the pandemic.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: The impact of COVID-19 on small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): empirical evidence for green economic implications

“…Resource-based theory and competitive behavior theory both support these findings. As Belas et al ( 2021 ) found, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in most regions face high levels of debt and cannot generate a profit from their operations, which is in line with our findings. Research conducted by Barabaschi et al ( 2022 ) is similar to our findings.…”

“…Ulvenblad and Barth’s ( 2021 ) findings align with our findings, confirming the importance of learning from consumers, opponents, and suppliers in identifying chances and improving innovation controlling in SMEs. However, these challenges can inspire managers of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to be more creative and, of course, to put the focus on promoting innovation (Belas et al 2021 ). According to our findings, SMEs have become more vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Barabaschi et al’s ( 2022 ) findings.…”

The Covid-19 Pandemic: The Initiator for Digital Inclusion or Exclusion of Smes in the Bulawayo Metropolitan Province, Zimbabwe

“…As an example, there were sizeable profit margins noted in surveys conducted in multiple developed countries as small businesses started using digital technologies to do their business processes (Belitski et al, 2022;Martin et al, 2016;United Nations, 2021). This is so because the use of digital technologies by SMEs tend to allow them to respond to unpredictable future pandemics flexibly and be able to mitigate the risks and challenges which might arise (Belas, Gavurova, Dvorsky, Cepel & Durana, 2021). When embraced, digital inclusion brings everyone to digitally participate, thereby reducing the social marginalisation, social inequalities and giving citizens the reasons to participate digitally, as alluded to by Ragnedda and Mutsvairo (2018).…”

Assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on small and medium-sized enterprises performance

“…In this case, financial performance is an essential factor that may quantify economic pandemic effects on the companies’ function and existence. SMEs entrepreneurs more negatively perceived the financial performance of their companies during the pandemic as opposed to the period before the pandemic ( Belas et al, 2021 ).…”