Regional Soft Environment And Sme Performance Relationship Mechanism

Practically, with the deepening of reform and opening up and the gradually improving of market economy, the government in China has realized the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) in promoting national economy, increasing the revenue and promoting employment, and issued many policies and regulations to create a good external environment for SMEs survival and development. However, there are still many problems in the process of SMEs development such as the short life, high production costs and seriously international competition. The difficulties SMEs got in have made people doubt about the effect of those policy laws and regulations the government issued. Theoretically, scholars still have no consistence with the problem above by now. Although some theoretical viewpoints are proposed to explain it, it is also considered to be questionable for the lack of theoretical support. In addition, research on the mechanism between regional soft environment (RSE) or entrepreneur competences (EC) and SMEs performance is underdeveloped and limited which in turn increases the difficulties to explain the problem above. Compare the lack of theoretical research and the urgent for the practical problem to solve, it is required to clarify the relation among RSE, EC and SMEs performance. Therefore, this study not only explores the mechanism among RSE, EC and SMEs performance generally and specifically, but also proposes the theoretical framework between RSE and SMEs performance based on corporate life cycle theory, so to remedying the deficiencies of the theoretical research on the one hand and explaining the practical problem on the other hand.Firstly, the paper reviews the literature about SMEs and puts forward the elements of RSE, EC, SMEs performance and the life cycle stages of SMEs development respectively based with DS/AHP method. Secondly, it proposes the hypothesis among the above elements. Finally, it tests the hypothesis using the questionnaire data which is gathered through simple random sampling and rolling sphere method.By thorough and in-depth theoretical and empirical analyses, the following conclusions are drawn through study in this paper:Firstly, RSE has direct and indirect significant effect on SMEs performance. Secondly, corporate life cycle is a moderator of the relationship between RSE and SMEs performance. Thirdly, RSE construction is a long-term project.The theoretic value and innovativeness of this paper are mostly embodied in the following three aspects:Firstly, it originally identifies the major factors of EC using DS/AHP method. Considering the advantages of DS/AHP method in dealing with multi-criteria decision making problems, this paper integrates the preference judgment information on the importance of several EC elements from scholars, government officials and entrepreneurs, and finally identifies six key factors which include strategic competence, conceptual competence, opportunity competence, relationship competence, organizing and leading competence, and learning competence based on the decision rule that chooses the top factors when the cumulative probability is greater than 0.8 in descending order. Using DS/AHP method in key elements identification can not only overcome the defects existed in the literature which still use the qualitative method and have no rigorous evidence support for the key factors recognition, but also lay the foundation for the hypothesis construction as follows.Secondly, it offers a fresh perspective of the combination of internal and external factors to study the effect mechanism among RSE, EC and SMEs performance. Through a review of the literature, it can be found that research on the mechanism among RSE, EC and SMEs performance is still underdeveloped. To overcome this defect, the paper offers a fresh perspective with the combination of internal and external factors, and tests the hypothesis using 262 questionnaire data. The empirical results show that the effect of RSE on SMEs performance is partially mediated by EC, which constitutes effective supplementation to the existing theories on SMEs success.Finally, it creatively investigates the moderating effect of corporate life cycle the between RSE and SMEs performance. Although the relationship between RSE and SMEs performance has caused the attention of scholars, but the literature mainly focus on the empirical analysis of public-listed private enterprises based on the macroscopic public data. In order to explore the mechanism empirically, this paper addresses the framework of them base on lift cycle theory, and tests the hypothesis through using 262 questionnaire data. The empirical results show that the effect of RSE on SMEs performance is moderated by the lift cycle stages of SMEs. The later the life cycle stage is, the smaller the effect of RSE to SMEs performance is. Research on the moderating effect of life cycle not only overcomes the theoretical loss of SMEs, but also provides useful references for the local government department to make a difference of policy measures according to the lift cycle stages of SMEs.