A recent SMJ article (Hulland, 1999) raises interesting questions about the proper use of partial least squares (PLS) in strategy research. The present note examines some of the issues raised in the article, and briefly extends the methodological discussion to the broader aspects of theory and empirical research in strategy.

The focus is on robust regression methods for problems where the predictor matrix has full rank and where it is rank deficient. For the first situation, various robust regression methods have been introduced, and here an overview of the most important proposals is given. For the latter case, robust partial least squares regression is discussed. The way of downweighting outlying observations is ...