Driving Blind: Strategic Decision-making in Small Companies

Long Range Planning

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 130-138

  Brouthers, Keith D ^c   Andriessen, Floris ^a,b   Nicolaes, Igor ^a  

^a VU UNIVERSITY AMSTERDAM   (Netherlands)

^b ABN AMRO Corporate Research   (Netherlands)

^c NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0010214051     PISSN: 00246301     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/s0024-6301(97)00099-x     Document Type: Article

References (27)

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2. In Mintzberg's 1976 study only the rational concept of decision making was considered. Since that time he has expanded on this topic and considers other factors that influence the decisions managers make. See for example, H. Mintzberg, Power in and Around the Organization, Prentice Hall: New Jersey (1983). H. Mintzberg, The organization as political arena. Journal of Management Studies 22 (2), 133-154 (1985).
3. In Mintzberg's 1976 study only the rational concept of decision making was considered. Since that time he has expanded on this topic and considers other factors that influence the decisions managers make. See for example, H. Mintzberg, Power in and Around the Organization, Prentice Hall: New Jersey (1983). H. Mintzberg, The organization as political arena. Journal of Management Studies 22 (2), 133-154 (1985).
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6. Eisenhardt and Bourgeois (1988).
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11. Findings based on Dutch firms may not be universally applicable because of (1) differences in national culture, Dutch are participative; (2) differences in supplier and customer size, most Dutch suppliers and customers are small; (3) differences in government control and intervention in business, Dutch government controls working hours, employment and benefits.
12. Because of the delays in reporting to the Chamber of Commerce and because of reporting discrepancies, firms with ten to fifty employees were selected. This gave us firms with actual sizes ranging from five to one-hundred employees.
13. A survey technique was used instead of case methodology because we were interested in identifying differences between large firm and small firm activities. Since the theory of decision making and influencing factors has already been supported by other studies, a large scale empirical test appeared to provide the type of data that could be compared to previous large firm studies.
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20. "Significance" refers to the statistical difference or relationship between two or more variables. For this paper items were deened to be significant if the probability of occurrence was less than ten percent.
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26. James and Hatten (1995).
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