Manzoor Ali Mirani

Shikarpuri Pickles, a renowned brand in Pakistan, has maintained its legacy over the decades. With a rich history and a reputation for excellence in pickle manufacturing, this pickle product has gained popularity all over Pakistan. Set within the context of Pakistan’s food industry, particularly the pickle industry, this case study highlights the business expansion dilemma faced by the owners of MBM Pickle Manufacturers. Ambitious about the growth, but due to the limited knowledge of international markets and exporting processes, the protagonist is faced with the dilemma of what they should do for exporting business and which country to target. Students are assigned to formulate well-reasoned answers to the discussion questions based on the learning theory. Additionally, students will utilize the Uppsala model for international trade and the Cuyvers, (2004) filters for export destination selection.

This chapter explores the critical role of green human resource management practices (GHRMP) in the improvement of sustainability and organizational performance in SMEs. Due to the rising worldwide awareness of environmental effects, SMEs are now pressured to adapt to sustainable development strategies. This chapter explores how the implementation of the GHRMP, especially in terms of green recruitment, training, performance evaluation, and engagement of employees, can assist SMEs in achieving congruency between business and environmental aims. Together with the support of big data analytics capability (BDAC) and top management support (TMS), GHRMP enables SMEs to optimize resource usage and improve environmental performance (EP). Results show the challenges SMEs face including financial, operational, and cultural barriers, and suggest practical solutions to overcome these obstacles. Through the integration of green HR practices, SMEs can achieve a balance between economic growth and environmental stewardship, positioning themselves as leaders in sustainable business practices.

This case examines the establishment of a small-scale business, Sindh Fruit Traders, owned by Mr Imtiaz and Mr Tehseen. The saturated local market condition is compelling them to look at export markets as means of expansion. The core challenges they face are identifying and selecting an appropriate export country and making the necessary preparations for the expansion. All these decisions have to be made before the next harvest season in July 2017. This case describes in detail the dates business in Khairpur, Pakistan. It provides information about how an individual commences business at a small scale and then expands with time by learning the techniques of the business. This case also explains the local trading of crops and traditional ways of conducting business in the date market of Khairpur and looks into ways in which research should be conducted to expand the business for exports. After discussion, the students will be able to understand the production and sales business of dates in general. More specifically, the students will understand how entrepreneurs are attracted to a business, what role research can play in making informed decisions, and the potential means to expand a local business into an international venture.

Improvement in social media (SM) platforms and their ability to enable small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to reach a large audience has led to changes in how entrepreneurial firms carry out their regular activities. Studies on entrepreneurship and SM adoption are relatively new and fragmented; however, there is scant interest from managers, scholars, and governments for future research work in this area in emerging countries. This study aims to investigate the role of SM adoption and innovation capabilities (IC) in improving SME performance. We employ the resource-based view (RBV) as a basis for the conceptual model and infer relationships between entrepreneurial orientation (EO), SM adoption, IC, and SME performance. A closed-ended questionnaire was administered to collect data through a web-based survey and quantitative analysis was employed to generalise the results. The proposed relationships are tested on a sample of 431 randomly selected SMEs, applying the PLS algorithm, bootstrapping, and blindfolding techniques using SmartPLS 3.0. The findings reveal that SME performance could be improved by EO, SM adoption, and IC. Additionally, SM adoption significantly mediates the EO–SME-performance relationship, and IC moderates the SM-adoption–SME-performance association. This paper also makes several theoretical and practical contributions.

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have become a vibrant and dynamic sector of the world economy. Information technology plays a vital role in improving the productivity and competitiveness of SMEs. The dynamic business environment has brought fierce competition among SMEs and, therefore, requires the owners to interact with internal and external members actively. Hence, this study aims to investigate the impact of technology, organization, and environment as important factors in the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises. It also examines the mediating role of social media adoption. Items were developed to measure the various purposes of social media use in organizations, which contribute to increasing the measurement of social media usage. For the empirical investigation, this paper used a closed-ended questionnaire. Using a quantitative method, we observed 423 responses through structural equation modeling. The findings of the study indicate that technology, organization, and the environment play effective roles for SME performance. More importantly, social media adoption positively mediates the relationship between technology, organization, environment, and SME performance. The study also helps organizations realize the advantages of using social media and specifies the rationale behind an organization’s investment in social media.

Management and sharing of knowledge has been among the top most strategic priorities of the organizations, due to its generally acknowledged role toward the improvement of organizational performance, accomplishment of organizational goals and achievement of competitive advantage. However, most of the organizations, despite spending huge budgets on the implementation of quality knowledge management systems, fail to enjoy the benefits of knowledge sharing due a number of individual organizational and technological barriers that impede the successful sharing of knowledge. Hence, it seems extremely important to understand the factors that impede the knowledge sharing and foil the successful implementation of knowledge management systems. This study has been conducted to empirically investigate the individual barriers to knowledge sharing. Based on 75 qualitative interviews within three health-care organizations of the capital of Pakistan, this research has identified unwillingness to share, lack of motivation, time deficiency, absence of trust, cultural dissimilarity and lack of a common language as some of the most significant individual barriers to knowledge sharing. This study has not only identified the barriers, but, also the remedies to knowledge sharing in the light of the recommendations from the interviewees.

The researchers from a number of fields and disciplines have analyzed the role of trust as one of the most significant factors affecting the organizational performance. Trust facilitates and moderates the impact of other variables on employee-performance or organizational behavior; since it builds up the grounds over which the foundation of certain expected outcomes and results can be laid on. Due to increasing importance of trust, there has been a rigorous focus of researchers, academicians and practitioners to identify the antecedents to trust i.e. the factors that increase or decrease the extent of trust in organizational settings. This paper presents a research framework of the antecedents to interpersonal trust development from an organizational perspective, in the light of the existing literature and available empirical evidence to help the researchers, academicians and practitioners to identify the determinants of interpersonal trust development. We believe that the constructs identified in this paper will help the researchers to develop the models of trust building and provide guidelines for meaningful and valuable research in future in the domain of trust development.