‘Respect’ and ‘self-determination’ women entrepreneurs’ identities and entrepreneurial discourses

In order to understand how women entrepreneurs enact or challenge gender discrimination, research on entrepreneurship has focussed on the concept of identity (Bruni et al., 2004; Lewis, 2013; Orser et al., 2011; Patterson et al., 2012). Here, Identity is conceptualized as a dynamic effect of the gender constrains with which women entrepreneurs deal in their particular contexts (Bruni et al., 2004). However, this line of research (e.g. Díaz- García and Welter, 2010; Pettersson and Cassel, 2014; Maden, 2015; Lewis, 2013) has not explored the distinctions of women’s identities according to their business backgrounds, and how women with identical backgrounds collectively construct their entrepreneurial identities, when they have the opportunity to interact with each other and share their experiences.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Individual Entrepreneurship Capacity and Performance of SMEs

This paper analyses the importance of human capital and organizational capital on the determination of SME’s performance, by proposing and testing a conceptual model about Individual Entrepreneurship Capacity, and its impact both on non-economic and economic performance. This constitutes an innovative approach in the sense that uses information collected at the individual level, that is, the entrepreneur. Moreover, it constitutes a first attempt for facing the caveat in the literature on the relationship among types of capital and entrepreneurial performance. A model where the individual entrepreneurship capital is defined as a function of two types of capital: Human and Organizational; is proposed and empirically tested. For the Human Capital we consider three dimensions: (a) Individual Characteristics; (b) Managerial Push; and (c) Managerial Pull. As concerns the Organizational Capital, four dimensions are considered: (i) Individual Entrepreneurial Behavior; (ii) Collective Entrepreneurial Behavior; (iii) Managerial Practices; and (iv) Organizational Culture (in terms of the Superstructure and the Socio-Structure). The use of the stepwise method provides the selection of significant variables that impact on SME’s performance. When only non-economic indicators are considered for measuring the performance, in what respects the human capital we find out that the only significant variable is: enthusiasm at work. In what concerns the organizational capital the significant variables are: efficient organizational structure; participative management; incentives for interdisciplinary discussion and dialogue; and frequent meetings of working groups. For its turn, when economic indicators are considered for measuring the performance, we find out that the significant human capital determinants are: entrepreneur’s intuition; and propensity for innovating activities. In terms of organizational capital determinants we reveal that the significant variables are: efficient organizational structure; and use of external indicators for improving entrepreneurial performance. The main policy implication of the paper is the possibility of creating, at an individual level, new incentives and motivational tools based on the identification of the most important variables of human capital and organizational capital, for fostering SME’s performance

Motivation at work: Case studies of Portuguese SMEs

This study intends to quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the motivation of the employees of three Portuguese Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with the statutes of Excellence, Leader and both statutes. These statutes were assigned by the Institute for Support to Small and Medium Enterprises and Innovation. A questionnaire was applied in 2016 based on the Multi-Factorial Scale and a brief interview with the managers of these Portuguese companies was conducted. It was found that the dimensions ‘‘work organization’’ and ‘‘commitment’’ presented lower results in the three companies, while the other dimensions had higher ones in terms of motivation at work. Only in the ‘‘performance’’ dimension were there significant differences in motivation at work that occurred between SME Leader and SME Excellence. It should be noted that, according to the results obtained, both in the opinion of managers and employees, the statutes did not contribute to motivation at work