Little things that count: A call for organizational research on microbusinesses

• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017
• Author: Cynthia L.S. Pury,Alice M. Brawley
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2184

Little things that count: A call for organizational

research on microbusinesses

ALICE M. BRAWLEY

1

*AND CYNTHIA L.S. PURY

2

1

Department of Psychology, Michigan State University,East Lansing, Michigan, U.S.A.

2

Department of Psychology, Clemson University, Clemson,South Carolina, U.S.A.

Summary The purpose of this Incubator is to encourage organizational researchers to attend to the most common type of

business in the United States—the microbusiness. After defining and describing these businesses, we propose

research questions on defining and managing performance, organizational citizenship, and work–family con-

flict in this novel business setting. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: microbusiness; small business; family business; performance management; organizational

citizenship behaviors

[Our employee’s] car broke down and he needed a battery. We bought him a battery to go in his car. …Corpo-

rations don’t have that like/hate relationship with employees, they’re just an employee, they’re a number, they’re

digits. - Microbusiness manager

While microbusinesses are individually very small (usually employing nine or fewer workers), these businesses ac-

count for 12 million private sector workers and 75 percent of all private businesses (Bureau of Labor Statistics,

2015). This means that three out of every four businesses in the USA are microbusinesses! Despite their prevalence

and importance in both the USA and in developing countries (e.g., Frese, 2000), organizational researchers rarely

study microbusinesses. The purpose of our Incubator is to encourage readers to expand our research to these very

small, but very common, businesses.

Although “microbusiness”was coined in finance through the work of Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank to

describe microloan recipients, today the term also describes businesses with very few employees. What counts as

“very few”varies. For example, US advocacy groups (e.g., the Small Business Administration and the National

Association for the Self-Employed) and some researchers (e.g., Kotey & Slade, 2005) define microbusinesses as

having four or fewer employees. In other cases, advocacy organizations (e.g., Small Business Administration,

Headd, 2015) and researchers (e.g., Honig, 1998) use a definition of one to nine employees. By any of these defi-

nitions, though, microbusinesses are much smaller than “small”businesses, which may have 500 or more employees

in manufacturing and mining industries and $7.5 million or more in annual receipts for nonmanufacturing industries

(United States Small Business Administration, 2016). Having 10 employees may be an important tipping point for

particular research questions because businesses beyond this size may more typically have middle managers, fewer

direct interactions between employees and managers, or other more formal management systems in place. In one

example, this size cutoff moderated the effectiveness of two management strategies—creating personalized work

environments and tailoring communications to individual employees—for business outcomes such as employee

retention (Brawley, 2016). Researchers should consider microbusiness characteristics relevant to their research

questions—such as having managers, or not—in addition to number of employees.

*Correspondence to: Alice M. Brawley, Ph.D. Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, 316 Physics Road, Rm. 346, East Lansing,

Michigan 48824 U.S.A. E-mail: alice.brawley@gmail.com

Article dedicated in loving memory of Bobby Clyde Brawley, Jr.

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 28 December 2016, Accepted 9 January 2017

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 38, 917–920 (2017)

Published online 26 January 2017 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2184

The Incubator