Limitations and future directions
The limitations of this study provide some interesting ideas for future research. The small sample size of seven SMEs may be seen as a limitation. It may be interesting to conduct more interviews with entrepreneurs/owners, especially from various industries, such as tourism, education, agriculture, apparel, accessories, and healthcare. While providing a starting point, generalizations outside the scope of this study are to be done with caution, as they may not fully reflect the entire organization. Second, the research uses information provided by one key informant per firm, who were the owners/entrepreneurs of SMEs, albeit they are the ones who fit the selection criteria, which has made the results susceptible to method bias. In order to have statistically validated and quantifiable data, future research should collect empirical evidence using a quantitative method. The final limitation related to data collection was that it was largely exploratory and conducted in a single country. It would be interesting to replicate this research in a wide variety of SMEs spread over several geographical areas and regions to allow generalization of the results and comparison of results between enterprises and countries.
