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Strategic and tactical moral orientations of managers play central roles in adopting social and environmental polices since these views can be reflected on a business’s practices and behaviors (Cantor, Morrow, McElroy & Montabon, 2013) Leaders, who are responsible for both levels plans, have to be aware of society’s concerns and work with them thoroughly, furthermore, they need to go further steps to take social and environmental decisions to satisfy local community and the firm’s performance (Baumgartner, 2014; Nejati, Quazi, Amran, & Ahmed, 2017). However, effective integration between these levels is a key to ensure that factors that could improve outcomes have been met (Baumgartner, 2014).
Previous research has examined the impacts of strategic and tactical orientations on performance (Asah, Fatoki, & Rungani, 2015); but these associations need further explanation, and it has been suggested that CSR might provide further understanding for those correlations since managers often seek to comply with stakeholders’ demands, consequently, social responsible practices affect the organization’s performance (Alikaj, Nguyen, & Medina, 2017). For instance, it could reflect the degree of the involvement of a firm in social and environmental arisen issues (Nejati, Quazi, Amran, & Ahmad 2017). However, literature has shown that CSR is still debated with different findings, mainly when applied in the context of Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) (Baumgartner, 2014). Thus, examining social responsible activities with orientations and outcomes can provide a clearer picture of sustainable performance, in particular across SMEs context in developing economies (Baumgartner, 2014; Petrenko, Aime, Ridge, & Hill, 2016).
Notably, little is known about smaller enterprises since the focus is on large organizations (Windolph, Schaltegger, & Herzig, 2014). In addition, those attempts are carried out in fragmented efforts; for example, CSR and sustainable performance (Emeseh & Songi, 2014) strategic and tactical perceptions (Nejati et al., 2017) or with a single factor of sustainability like environmental aspects (Papagiannakis & Lioukas, 2012) and social factors (Pierto, 2012). Remarkably, the examination of owners’ orientations on sustainability has been largely ignored (Gao, 2017), that shows a gap across social responsible practices and sustainable performance domain (du Plessis & Grobler, 2014; Baumgartner, 2014). In other words, integrating strategic and tactical orientations and sustainability is assumed to demonstrate a comprehensive explanation of why an enterprise reaches sustainable performance whereas others are not (Petrenko et al., 2016).
Thus, the aim is to address literature gaps pertaining to the complex relationships between strategic, tactical orientations and sustainable performance (economic, environmental, and social). In particular, is to examine them across SMEs with a mediating role of social responsible activities.
The sample of the research is SMEs in manufacturing sector in Tunisia. In accordance to the World Bank (WB) manufacturers contribute to Tunisian’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) almost 16%, and is seen as a second contributor to the country’s economy (WB, 2015). As shown those enterprises have a major influence on Tunisian’s economy (Statistiques Tunisie, 2015). The data has been gathered through a quantitative method by a questionnaire that is distributed to the managers of these enterprises.