The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on selected areas of a management system in SMEs

Abstract

The current pandemic, that has wider economic and social impacts, will put to the test all enterprises, which will be forced to search for new survival strategies and to create existential prognoses of business operations during great economic and social uncertainty and new crises whose impacts are hard to predict. This fact motivated the team of authors to realise the study that aims at researching and quantifying the impacts of the pandemic COVID-19 on selected areas of management in SMEs in the Czech Republic (CR) and the Slovak Republic (SR). The research sample consisted of 1502 SMEs, 822 SMEs before the pandemic, 680 SMEs during the pandemic, 814 from CR, and 688 from SR. Attitudes between SMEs according to nationality and period of research were verified with a chi-squared test and Kruskal-Wallis tests. The results of both countries confirmed that the pandemic has a negative impact on the financial performance of SMEs. The government economic measures may help the enterprises to recover, said 40.0% of Czech entrepreneurs, but only 30% of Slovak entrepreneurs. However, the entrepreneurs in SMEs equally perceive other aspects of corporate governance and business risk management during the pandemic. © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.