Entrepreneurial orientation, strategic planning and firm performance: The impact of national cultures

How can firms achieve high performance in different cultural settings? We use a contingency perspective to explore how configurations of entrepreneurial orientation and strategic planning lead to high firm performance and contrast these results between cultural contexts. Fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis is used as a statistical technique that can detect combinations of independent variables that lead to similar outcomes. The results derived from a data set of 2506 firms from seven countries show that a combination of innovativeness and strategic planning activities leads to high performance regardless of cultural context. A strong orientation towards specialised and innovative offerings therefore needs to be combined with strategic planning activities. The impact of proactiveness varies across cultural contexts and leads to high performance when combined with strategic planning in high uncertainty avoidance and long-term oriented cultural contexts that favour the development of bureaucratic structures.