What Role Did Management Practices Play in SME Growth Post-recession?

Alex Bryson and John Forth

No 16-11, DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London

Abstract: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are known to contribute significantly to aggregate economic growth. However, little is known about the role played by management practices in SME growth since recession. We contribute to the literature on SME growth by analysing longitudinal administrative data on firms' employment and turnover, taken from the UK's Business Structure Database (BSD), with data on management practices collected in face-to-face interviews from the HR Managers and employees who were surveyed as part of the 2011 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS). We find off-the-job training is the only management practice that is robustly and significantly associated with higher employment growth, increased turnover, and a decline in closure probabilities, over the period 2011-2014. The findings suggest SME investment in off-the-job training is sub-optimal in Britain such that firms could benefit economically from increasing the amount of off-the-job training they offer to their non-managerial employees.

Keywords: SMEs; small and medium-sized enterprises; employment growth; sales; workplace closure; HRM; training; recession (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L25 M12 M50 M53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-07-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-ent, nep-hrm and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.ucl.ac.uk/REPEc/pdf/qsswp1611.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: What Role Did Management Practices Play in SME Growth Post-Recession? (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qss:dqsswp:1611

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London Quantitative Social Science, Social Research Institute, 55-59 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0NU. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr Neus Bover Fonts ().