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Top1. Introduction
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are viewed as crucial players in broadening the regional export base for countries. Furthermore, the important goals of SME strategy include creating legislative tools such as proper governance that promote regional connectivity and create new export-oriented value chains, in which SMEs may engage with significant goal orientation. Because they may profit from “systemic,” large-scale economies without sacrificing the distinctiveness that a small industrial organization can only provide, SMEs may get the critical mass needed to compete in global markets. The literature suggests that the institutional substitution model is least suited to developing a competitive market for social welfare services, aligning with the Good Governance principle. The reorganization will aid in diversifying the economy and exports and creating competitive advantages in fields such as aeronautical engineering and manufacture, export of power and electric machine manufacturing products, and manufacture of complete items built from synthetic materials from forest products to become the world leader over time. A knowledge of the importance of the strategic vision and task in attaining social and commercial objectives and building social and corporate sustainability and competitive advantage, study-oriented towards explaining the barriers and the influence of governance in solving those barriers, is vital.
Service delivery has become more complicated, necessitating greater sophistication in how general practices monitor business success, establishing a balance between high-quality products and the long-term viability of services. However, the literature has pointed out that many governance issues, such as lack of readiness, overlap, contradiction, and redundancy while implementing reforms such as e-governance, confront SMEs’ everyday operations. So, the role of governance is to provide future strategic communication direction including account characteristics such as firm ownership, operational procedures, and operating subsector; a cross-country safety-net incentive-compatible strategy; a transnational entrepreneurship incubator to assist the members in working together; innovative training materials to bring economic and organizational benefits; identification of corporate social responsibility (CSR) management quirks and antecedents, impediments, and the CSR's possible impact; improvement in internationalization, the performance of quality procedures, and business productivity; elimination of vulnerability concerns; and improvement in risk mitigation for SMEs.
Due to problems faced by SMEs and the benefits of the solution suggested in the literature, it has gained lots of attraction from diverse disciplines, including international business and healthcare. The increasing number of articles published each year demonstrates the importance of this topic among scholars further. So, a systematic review of the literature with bibliometric data related to governance in SMEs can inform research in the domain. While review papers on governance in SMEs are there in the literature, they are not directly talking about the impact of governance in solving the SMEs’ issues. Instead, these articles are typically all-inclusive (e.g., Li et al., 2020; Mejía-Franco et al., 2021) or specific to a particular domain such as CSR (Vázquez-Carrasco & López-Pérez, 2013), finance (Palacín-Sánchez & Pérez-López, 2016; Kumar et al. 2020), the tourism industry (Żemła, 2016), human resource and administration-related issues (Macculloch, 2001), healthcare (Peace et al., 2017), and public policy (Huggins & Williams, 2009).
The literature suggests an extensive role of governance in SMEs, but there is lack of systematic review that presents the problems faced by SMEs in this context. Such a study is vital to understand how much ground research related to the influence of governance in solving SMEs’ problems has been covered and what should contribute to generating knowledge further. Therefore, following the research model suggested by (Olanrewaju et al., 2020), this study will present the variables of governance and firm performance that influence SMEs. In this paper, we incorporate the following research questions: