Impact of Entrepreneurial Leadership Style on Business Performance of SMEs in Tanzania

Tresphory Othumary Mgeni

doi:10.4172/2169-026x.1000142

Abstract

This study attempts to explore the extent to which entrepreneurial leadership style is used by CEOs in Tanzanian SMEs. The study also attempts to determine the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership style of CEOs and business performance of small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) CEOs in Tanzania. The research is based on primary data collected by mailed questionnaires and analyzed quantitatively using Pearson product moment correlation and simple regression by SPSS. The findings show that 68.88% of all CEOs in Tanzania use entrepreneurial leadership style. More over the findings showed that there is a significant strong positive correlation between entrepreneurial leadership style and business performance of SMEs in Tanzania

Highlights

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have been one of the vibrant growing economic sectors since the market policy reforms of 1980s and 1990s in most developing countries [1]
The hypothesis testing aimed at 3 objectives namely: Assess the extent to which entrepreneurial leadership style is used in Tanzanian small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)
The findings show that there is a positive correlation between entrepreneurial leadership styles and business performance of SMEs in Tanzania

Summary

Introduction

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have been one of the vibrant growing economic sectors since the market policy reforms of 1980s and 1990s in most developing countries [1]. Entry into business is not a problem to SMEs in Tanzania, but its development is very slow both size wise and in market coverage [4]. According to Dalberg [5], nearly half of all SMEs start-ups in in developing countries, fail within 5 years whereas only a few of them grows to become large firms. The situation is even worse in Tanzania where , most of the start-ups fail and the surviving firms show a very slow rate of growth [4]. In a highly competitive business environment, survival of business is uncertain and even more stringent to small businesses as they are more vulnerable to failures, The situation is even worse when SMEs are less innovative and highly dynamic success of such business firms in 2 require effective leadership styles [2,4,5,7,8,9]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion