Demystifying Misted Mirrors to Investigate Emerging People Issues in SMEs: Implications for Strategic Change

Although ‘mirroring’ has been studied within MNEs, the way SMEs deal with the challenges associated with implementing new products and services in change contexts remains a neglected area. By subsuming mirroring and change management theories under organisational theory, the author examines the impacts of these constructs on how four SMEs dealt with some of their challenges as they tried to launch new products, improve services and staff performance. The paper contributes to the organisation theory and strategy literature by initially identifying ‘organisations design products’ as a gap whose linkage to HRM architectural pairings produced the theoretical contribution referred to as ‘Contingent Misting’. The theory helps in identifying the structural, cultural and technical characteristics that SMEs are dealing with and deepens our understanding of some of the emerging mirroring architectures that SMEs face. A thematic categorisation approach to the analysis of the interview data led not only to the paper’s theoretical contribution of ‘Contingent Misting’ but also highlights individual and organisational-level characteristics whose combination help SMEs to better adapt to the complex challenges of product and service redesigns. The paper’s 85 semi-structured interviews in 4 UK/internationally-connected SMEs was used to successfully frame SMEs’ products, services, structures and people in a theory that highlights the contingent nature of people’s competence when SMEs implement changes to practically tackle their challenges. ‘Contingent Misting’ was previously missing in the architectural pairings and mirroring literature and is therefore proposed as the paper’s theoretical contribution. Its benefits, implications and future research directions are identified