Change Management Survey on Innovative ITC Romanian SMEs.

Change management implementation has so far been studied mainly in large companies (i.e. high-tech and multinational enterprises). This exploratory paper investigates if change management practices are also applied by innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Drawing on a database collected from 319 innovative SMEs in Romania from ICT sector, we explore peculiarities and trends on SMEs change management process, based on data base analysis from 2014. The survey furthermore focuses on the motives and perceived challenges when SMEs adopt change management practices. Within the survey, we define innovative SMEs as small and medium enterprises who introduce innovation practices reflecting exploration and exploitation. We find that the responding SMEs engage in many change practices and have increasingly adopted such practices during the past years. As a limitation of our study, we investigate only companies from ITC sector, because was difficult to identify a large sample of innovative SMEs on areas related to manufacturing and services industries, but medium-sized firms are on average more heavily involved in change process than their smaller counterparts. We furthermore find that ITC innovative SMEs pursue change management primarily for market-related motives such as meeting customer demands, or keeping up with competitors. Their most important challenges relate to organizational and cultural issues as a consequence of dealing with increased external contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]