Dear Chijioke,

The short answer is that it is indeed useful to control for age, size and location. Although the direction of the effect may vary with the measure of performance, age and size are correlates of most performance measures. As for location, in your case the first question is whether there are institutional differences between countries that cause systematic differences. Assuming there are, then if these are pretty much constant across firms, then a dummy variable could suffice to control for differences between countries. An example of that may be different corporate tax rates. A second question is whether these country influences would have different effects depending on firm size or age. An example of that would be different policies to favor small or young vs. large or old firms, such as via R&D subsidies or incubation policies.

For more on this, I attach the following paper:

Martin, Xavier, “Institutional advantage.” Global Strategy Journal, volume 4 issue 1, pp. 55-69, 2014.

Dear Chijioke,

It is advisable to control for firm size, age, and location in order to make sure that these control variables are held constant during your research investigation while you test the relationship between your independent variable, strategic management process, and dependent variable, firm performance.

It depends on your aim - if you want to filter the answers using these variables than you should do it, no doubt. The other thing is you cannot compare too diverse data - they have to be similar from cretain points of view. I suppose the location is very important to observe, the age - it depends...., and the size - yes, that could be very important (the strategic management of an SME could and should be totally different from a large company management).

The most important thing is your objectives since they determine which variables to use and how you use them.

Dear Chijioke E Nwachukwu,

In my opinion, it is very important to control for those variables. Prior studies have shown that those variables affect performance. But you must justify them with empirical supports or statistical computations.

Thanks

If we want to investigate true nature of cause and effect relationship between strategic management process (IV and) and firm performance (DV) then it is necessary to control the other variable that can have possible effect on dependent variables.