Issue 2, 2018

Skaletckii E. V., Shirokova G. V., Gafforova E. B. Relationship between Competitive Strategies and Russian SMEs’ Performance during Economic Crisis

An economic crisis significantly affects market conditions by decreasing effective demand that forces firms to fit their strategies into changing environment. The purpose of this article is to theoretically and empirically assess the relationship between competitive strategies of Russian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and their performance during an economic crisis. Data for testing was collected via the survey of managers of private Russian SMEs in 2015–2016. Then data was supplemented by the indicators exported from financial statements from SPARK-Interfax database. The final sample of the study includes 456 firms representing all the federal districts of the country. The regression analysis demonstrated contradictory results. While the direct links between competitive strategies and firm performance are insignificant, the combination of innovative differentiation and marketing differentiation as well as of marketing differentiation and cost leadership are positively related to SMEs’ performance, whereas the combination of innovative differentiation and cost leadership has a negative relationship with SMEs performance. The revealed nature of the relationship between combinations of competitive strategies and the firms’ performance can be used by managers to adapt their firm strategies to the conditions of an economic crisis. Overall, the main value of this research is the contextualization of the concept of generic competitive strategies for the market in the conditions of an economic crisis. The findings of this study contribute to the ongoing debate between proponents and opponents of combining competitive strategies. Along with that, taking into account the fact that the use of cross-sectional data does not allow to track development of indicators in time, the authors acknowledge the importance of longitudinal research of the efficiency of competitive strategies as a perspective venue for the further studies. Keywords: small and medium enterprises, firms’ performance, competitive strategies, economic crisis, Russia.

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