Does the personality of small and medium-sized companies' directors affect exporting results?

In this work, we examine whether values in Schwartz's scale For Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME) export managers from the most successful export companies differ from those for SME managers from companies with limited export success. The study was conducted with a sample of 196 Spanish export SMEs. First, we conducted a latent class cluster analysis to classify companies according to their export performance. Then, we employed means comparison test to find significant differences in Schwartz's scale between executives from companies in both groups. Significant differences were found for the following values: honesty, influence, ambition, loyalty, social justice, authority, exciting life, and social order.

KEYWORDS:
Export performance; Schwartz value scale; internationalization; Small and Medium Enterprises; latent cluster analysis