Who benefits most? The effects of managerial assistance on high- versus low-performing small businesses

Entrepreneurial networking: a blessing or a curse? Differential effects for low, medium and high performing franchisees

“…Tsai 2001;Ritter and Gemünden 2003;Baker et al 2016). However, entrepreneurship studies have rarely accounted for the heterogeneity among entrepreneurs in terms of how they utilize the resources deriving from their entrepreneurial networks (see Hayter (2015) for a brief discussion and Arenius and De Clercq (2005) and Seo et al (2014) for exceptions). Our study contributes by including the entrepreneur's firm performance as an important contingency variable (cf.…”

“…Our study contributes by including the entrepreneur's firm performance as an important contingency variable (cf. Seo et al 2014). We propose that the level of performance reached by an entrepreneur affects the benefits the entrepreneur is able to draw from his networking activity.…”

“…We refer to this as absorptive capacity (following many authors, such as Cohen andLevinthal 1990, Tsai 2001). The second one is the extent to which the acquired knowledge is useful given the entrepreneur's idiosyncratic circumstances (Seo et al 2014;Baker et al 2016). The literature points at two important aspects of such knowledge usefulness.…”

“…High quality actors often have less to learn, particularly from lower quality partners with a small knowledge base. Second, the usefulness of knowledge for a specific actor depends on whether the knowledge offered fits with the actor's knowledge needs, which in turn depends on a firm's characteristics such as a firm's innovation orientation (Xu 2015) or firm performance (Seo et al 2014). For example, Xu (2015) demonstrates that firms that aim for radical innovation need access to broad rather than deep knowledge, and Seo et al (2014) find that low performing firms benefit more from access to basic knowledge on primary business functions rather than knowledge on secondary business functions, whereas for high performers it is the other way around.…”

“…Moreover, our framework points at network utilization as an important contingency variable influencing the actual utilization of the accessible knowledge by the franchisee. Following Seo et al (2014), we posit that attained franchisee unit performance is an adequate indicator of such network utilization for three reasons. First, linked to the absorptive capacity argument, high-performance franchisees are likely to have a higher absorptive capacity than low-performance franchisees; high performers already have the experience and knowledge needed to identify and successfully implement new knowledge in their units.…”