Symbolic and Instrumental Factors for Attracting People to Smes: Relationships With the Entrepreneur's Leadership Style
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14211/regepe.v7i2.672Keywords:
SMEs, Attraction Factors. Transformational Leadership, Employer’s Attractivenes.Abstract
Literature on people management focuses on large companies and therefore has given little attention to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This research seeks to fill this gap by investigating the relationship between entrepreneur style and approaches to attracting people to SMEs. Therefore, a survey was conducted with 146 SMEs, testing a set of hypotheses by structural equations modeling. The results indicate that there is a relationship between the entrepreneur's style (transformational versus transactional) and the kinds of attributes (symbolic or instrumental) emphasized in attracting people. It was also observed that the bigger the company is, the less emphasis is given to symbolic factors. On the other hand, SMEs emphasize more symbolic factors of attraction than other segments. In addition, the results indicate that attraction approaches are more impacted by the entrepreneur's style than by the characteristics of the company/business (age, size, segment).
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