Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T03:19:14.688Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Senior Leaders in Small Enterprises: Insights Into the Field of Entrepreneurship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Chao Miao*
Affiliation:
Department of Management and Marketing, Franklin P. Perdue School of Business, Salisbury University
Shanshan Qian
Affiliation:
Department of Management, College of Business and Economics, Towson University
Ronald H. Humphrey
Affiliation:
Department of Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Chao Miao, Department of Management and Marketing, Franklin P. Perdue School of Business, Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD 21801. E-mail: [email protected]

Extract

The focal article (Reynolds, McCauley, Tsacoumis, and the Jeanneret Symposium Participants, 2018) reviewed and discussed the challenges, practices, and opportunities for the assessment and development for senior leaders. They summarized a set of accepted wisdom for assessing senior leaders in the areas of assessment criteria, contexts, and implementation, and meanwhile, pointed out what should be explored and done in the future. One of the central premises of the focal article seems to be built on the assumption that organizations may have sufficient resources to follow the accepted wisdom to ensure the quality and effectiveness of assessment and development for senior leaders. In addition, most, if not all, of the research findings summarized and discussed in the focal article may be based on the studies under the context of established companies. Hence, whether the implications and suggestions from the focal article can generalize to small enterprises remain an open question. For example, a typical small enterprise in the United States is a company capitalized with about $25,000 (Shane, 2009). Most of these enterprises are highly centralized, have negative cash flow, and have troubles in securing cash and in obtaining customer acceptance (Rutherford & Buller, 2007). Thus, these companies may not be able to follow the accepted wisdom as recommended in the focal article. We realize that some small businesses and start-ups are extremely well funded, so our following comments apply only to those small enterprises with scarce resources.

Type
Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

The authors would like to thank Jeffrey M. Pollack for his valuable feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript.

References

Ames, M., & Runco, M. A. (2005). Predicting entrepreneurship from ideation and divergent thinking. Creativity and Innovation Management, 14, 311315.Google Scholar
Bhide, A. (1992). Bootstrap finance: The art of start-ups. Harvard Business Review, 70, 109117.Google Scholar
Decker, R., Haltiwanger, J., Jarmin, R., & Miranda, J. (2014). The role of entrepreneurship in US job creation and economic dynamism. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28, 324.Google Scholar
de Jong, A., Song, M., & Song, L. Z. (2013). How lead founder personality affects new venture performance: The mediating role of team conflict. Journal of Management, 39, 18251854.Google Scholar
Garg, S., & Eisenhardt, K. M. (2017). Unpacking the CEO–board relationship: How strategy making happens in entrepreneurial firms. Academy of Management Journal, 60, 18281858.Google Scholar
Higashide, H., & Birley, S. (2002). The consequences of conflict between the venture capitalist and the entrepreneurial team in the United Kingdom from the perspective of the venture capitalist. Journal of Business Venturing, 17, 5981.Google Scholar
Humphrey, R. H. (2013). Effective leadership: Theories, cases, and applications. Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Jones, O., & Jayawarna, D. (2010). Resourcing new businesses: Social networks, bootstrapping and firm performance. Venture Capital, 12, 127152.Google Scholar
Lazear, E. M. (2005). Entrepreneurship. Journal of Labor Economics, 23, 649680.Google Scholar
Martin, B. C., McNally, J. J., & Kay, M. J. (2013). Examining the formation of human capital in entrepreneurship: A meta-analysis of entrepreneurship education outcomes. Journal of Business Venturing, 28, 211224.Google Scholar
Miao, C., Rutherford, M. W., & Pollack, J. M. (2017). An exploratory meta-analysis of the nomological network of bootstrapping in SMEs. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 8, 18.Google Scholar
Morse, E. A., Fowler, S. W., & Lawrence, T. B. (2007). The impact of virtual embeddedness on new venture survival: Overcoming the liabilities of newness. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 31, 139159.Google Scholar
Pollack, J. M., & Bosse, D. A. (2014). When do investors forgive entrepreneurs for lying? Journal of Business Venturing, 29, 741754.Google Scholar
Reynolds, D. H., McCauley, C. D., Tsacoumis, S., & the Jeanneret Symposium Participants. (2018). A critical evaluation of the state of assessment and development for senior leaders. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 11 (4), 630652.Google Scholar
Rosenbusch, N., Brinckmann, J., & Bausch, A. (2011). Is innovation always beneficial? A meta-analysis of the relationship between innovation and performance in SMEs. Journal of Business Venturing, 26, 441457.Google Scholar
Rutherford, M. W., & Buller, P. F. (2007). Searching for the legitimacy threshold. Journal of Management Inquiry, 16, 7892.Google Scholar
Rutherford, M. W., Buller, P. F., & Stebbins, J. M. (2009). Ethical considerations of the legitimacy lie. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 33, 949964.Google Scholar
Rutherford, M. W., Pollack, J. M., Mazzei, M. J., & Sanchez-Ruiz, P. (2017). Bootstrapping: Reviewing the literature, clarifying the construct, and charting a new path forward. Group & Organization Management, 42, 657706.Google Scholar
Sarooghi, H., Libaers, D., & Burkemper, A. (2015). Examining the relationship between creativity and innovation: A meta-analysis of organizational, cultural, and environmental factors. Journal of Business Venturing, 30, 714731.Google Scholar
Shane, S. (2009). Why encouraging more people to become entrepreneurs is bad public policy. Small Business Economics, 33, 141149.Google Scholar
Stam, W., Arzlanian, S., & Elfring, T. (2014). Social capital of entrepreneurs and small firm performance: A meta-analysis of contextual and methodological moderators. Journal of Business Venturing, 29, 152173.Google Scholar