Operational Integration, Governance Culture, and Perceived Profitability in Bakery SMEs: Evidence from Lima, Peru

This study examines whether two within-sample empirical domains of internal control, Control Integration and Operational Internalization (CIOI) and Governance and Control Culture (GCC) are associated with perceived profitability in small and medium-sized bakeries in Lima, Peru. Using a cross-sectional, non-probability survey, data were obtained from 112 individual respondents. The respondent is the analytical unit; bakery identifiers were not retained, so actual within-bakery dependence cannot be estimated empirically. Ordinal exploratory and within-sample confirmatory model comparisons were conducted in R using polychoric correlations and WLSMV. The retained sample-specific measurement representation comprised 15 CIOI items, four GCC items, and a narrow three-item perceived-profitability (PP) measure. In the fully adjusted SEM4, CIOI was positively associated with PP conditional on the measured covariates (β = 0.517, p = 0.002), whereas GCC was not statistically significant (β = 0.116, p = 0.368); respondent-reported firm size was positively associated with PP (β = 0.484, p = 0.001). Adjusted SEM4 sensitivity specifications yielded CIOI coefficients of β = 0.488–0.568, while GCC remained non-significant. A direct Wald comparison of the CIOI and GCC coefficients was not statistically significant (p = 0.133), so the apparent difference between the two associations should be regarded as suggestive rather than established. However, same-source common-method variance, unmeasured confounding, non-probability sampling, unknown bakery nesting, respondent-role heterogeneity, and same-sample measurement development materially limit inference. The findings therefore support a sample-bound cross-sectional association, not a causal or population-level effect. Unknown within-bakery dependence remains a first-order limitation because the protocol-based dependence sensitivity is not an empirical cluster-adjusted analysis.