SME Performance: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda

Abstract

The literature in SMEs has increased in the last decade and has shown a clear growth trend in capturing different contexts and approaches of this firm growth phenomenon. However, the research is still fragmented, and no significant studies have paid attention to integrate the growing literature on firm performance in the small business context. This study is conducted to understand how SMEs performance research has amplified in the last decade. The purpose of this study is to provide a systematic review of the small business performance in the existing literature, derive a comprehensive definition of business performance and highlights significant prospects for future research. To fulfil the research objective, an extensive literature review was carried out on the SMEs performance spread over 14 journals identified from online academic databases of EBSCO. A total of 38 empirical articles on SME performance and growth research spanning from 2000 to 2018 were analysed based on different classification structures. The finding shows that SMEs performance is an emerging concept in Entrepreneurship research.