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Trust has become a major issue among online shoppers. This underresearched subject will predictably determine the success or failure of e-commerce vendors. The lack of face-to-face interaction, the inability to inspect goods and services prior to purchase, and the asynchronous exchange of goods and money all contribute to the perceived risk of purchasing online and the resulting need for trust. Trust is particularly critical for small and new Internet ventures confronted by the liability of newness (Stinchcombe 1965). Lacking, among other things, a name that is readily recognized in the marketplace, entrepreneurial Internet ventures require trust if they are to succeed. The research presented in this article addresses this issue by building on the work of McKnight and colleagues and considering the effects of propensity to trust on trusting beliefs. Specifically, the author predicts that propensity to trust will significantly affect perceived ability, benevolence, and integrity but only for those individuals with limited direct experience. Based on a sample of web survey participants, the author found that propensity to trust significantly impacted perceived ability and benevolence for individuals with limited direct experience only. No statistically significant results were found for the effects of propensity to trust on perceived integrity.

This article reviews literatures on legitimacy, trust, and e-commerce and integrates them to propose a model of strategies designed to enhance the perceived legitimacy and trustworthiness of ventures.

Entrepreneurship researchers use various types of screening criteria to select samples for study. In that selecting these criteria is, in effect, choosing a definition or model of entrepreneurship, the consequences are immense and have had a direct impact on the generalizability of research and theory development in our field. The purpose of this study is to help entrepreneurship researchers better understand these consequences and, thereby, improve our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomenon. Four of the most commonly used screening criteria are included in this study: firm age, firm size, firm growth, and innovation. Based on a sample of 368 manufacturing firms, the results indicate that few firms fit all or even most of the considered screening criteria and independent-dependent variable relationships vary considerably by screening criteria selection.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) commonly struggle to acquire needed financial, human, and technological resources. The above being stated, recent scholarly research argues that SMEs that are able to successfully navigate the legitimacy threshold are better able to gather the resources they need to survive and grow. This article provides an empirical test of that claim by examining whether the presence of a corporate parent positively influences SME resource acquisition. Results of the study show that SMEs with corporate parents, when compared to like-sized independent SMEs, have higher credit scores, have more complete management teams, use more computers, and are more likely to be on the Internet. These differences are most pronounced for very small firms and diminish in significance as firm size increases. Study implications include the notion that presence of a corporate parent likely represents a successful navigation of the legitimacy threshold, positively increasing SME resource acquisition.

The importance of performance measurement is largely undisputed. There is debate, however, regarding the equivalency of objective and subjective performance measures.This debate has not considered a frequently used subjective measure, satisfaction with performance, to be an important measure independent of its equivalency with objective measures. Using a sample of 368 manufacturing firms, this study found that objective measures explained only a modest amount of variance in satisfaction with performance and that other variables added significantly to the explained variance.These factors included perceived environmental hostility, vulnerability, perceived competitive advantage, and commitment.

The purpose of the current study was to assess the impact of information technology on strategic flexibility for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Results of the study show that under conditions of low environmental dynamism, IT capabilities are associated with greater reactive strategic flexibility. Specifically, IT capabilities enabling the management of internal activities was significant. Under conditions of high environmental dynamism, IT capabilities are associated with greater proactive strategic flexibility. Specifically, IT capabilities enabling the management of competitor information was significant. Managerial as well as future research implications are discussed.

In recent years, practitioners have identified a number of problems with traditional performance management (PM) systems, arguing that PM is broken and needs to be fixed. In this chapter, we review criticisms of traditional PM practices that have been mentioned by journalists and practitioners and we consider the solutions that they have presented for addressing these concerns. We then consider these problems and solutions within the context of extant scholarly research and identify (a) what organizations should do going forward to improve PM practices (i.e., focus on feedback processes, ensure accountability throughout the PM system, and align the PM system with organizational strategy) and (b) what scholars should focus research attention on (i.e., technology, strategic alignment, and peer-to-peer accountability) in order to reduce the science-practice gap in this domain.

In this project, we propose and test a new device – wearable sociometric badges containing small microphones – as a low-cost and relatively unobtrusive tool for measuring stress response to group processes. Specifically, we investigate whether voice pitch, measured using the microphone of the sociometric badge, is associated with physiological stress response to group processes.

We collect data in a laboratory setting using participants engaged in two types of small-group interactions: a social interaction and a problem-solving task. We examine the association between voice pitch (measured by fundamental frequency of the participant’s speech) and physiological stress response (measured using salivary cortisol) in these two types of small-group interactions.

We find that in the social task, participants who exhibit a stress response have a statistically significant greater deviation in voice pitch (from their overall average voice pitch) than those who do not exhibit a stress response. In the problem-solving task, participants who exhibit a stress response also have a greater deviation in voice pitch than those who do not exhibit a stress response, however, in this case, the results are only marginally significant. In both tasks, among participants who exhibited a stress response, we find a statistically significant correlation between physiological stress response and deviation in voice pitch.

We conclude that wearable microphones have the potential to serve as cheap and unobtrusive tools for measuring stress response to group processes.