Perceived competitiveness as an antecedent of strategic governance: adaptive signals in Ibero-American MSMEs

Purpose This study analyzes whether current perceptions of business competitiveness are associated with the future strategic orientation of organizational governance in Ibero-American MSMEs, with an emphasis on Honduras. Unlike traditional approaches, this work inverts the analytical logic and examines perceived competitive signals (environment and internal performance) as antecedents of future corporate governance decisions. Design/methodology/approach The research adopts a quantitative and explanatory-comparative approach, with data from the survey of the 2024 Ibero-American MSME Report by FAEDPYME (7,762 companies in 12 countries) (FAEDPYME 2024). The Perceived Business Competitiveness Index (PBCI), with environment and performance dimensions, and the Strategic Governance Perspective Index (SGPI), derived through (k-means) and distances to centroids, are constructed. The association is evaluated with OLS models with country fixed effects and robustness analysis with fractional models. Findings The perception of internal performance is positively and statistically significantly associated with the future strategic orientation of governance, while the perception of the competitive environment does not present a significant association once business characteristics and country heterogeneity are controlled for. This pattern suggests that the future governance orientation (towards continuity, professionalization or succession) responds more to confidence in perceived internal capabilities than to the reading of external conditions. The Honduran subsample maintains the same direction for the performance component, although with lower statistical significance, while the environment component is also not significant in the Honduran case. Practical implications The findings have differentiated implications for two audiences. For MSME managers, they suggest that governance decisions (continuity, professionalization and succession) are more linked to confidence in perceived internal performance than to the reading of the external environment, which invites strengthening internal capabilities as a basis for anticipatory strategic planning. For public policymakers and business support institutions, the results support the design of differentiated interventions according to the company's strategic profile, with special attention to MSMEs facing greater restrictions in internal capabilities. Originality/value The study inverts the traditional logic by positioning perceived competitiveness as an antecedent and not as a result of the future strategic orientation of governance, opening an adaptive reading of the phenomenon. As a methodological contribution, it proposes the SGPI as a continuous indicator constructed through unsupervised learning.