Organizational Configuration and Performance of Small and Medium Enterprises

Abstract

This study was designed to harmonize the positions of Miles and Snow, Miller and Mintzberg theories of organizational configuration, and then come up with an appropriate organizational configuration for SMEs. In doing it, on-line published empirical and conceptual articles and reports related to the theories and SMEs’ performance were assembled and classified according to SMEs’ performance-related, theory-related and both-related and then analyzed. The analysis revealed that, the difference between the theories is a matter of dimension, therefore, relevant components of the theories were drawn and a configuration framework was proposed for SMEs. The proposed model included Competitive, Internal and Corporate dimensions of configuration and overcomes the issues that hinder the adoption of organizational configuration in SMEs. Finally, it was recommended that, researchers should henceforth consider the theories as complementary and deign empirical researches to test the validity of the proposed framework.