Good Leadership is Essential for Any Business, Even for the Small Ones

Small- and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are one of the most important driving forces of the performance of Hungarian economy. Not only because of their flexibility due to their small size but also their adaptability to the environmental changes. One of the most significant processes during the lifecycle of SMEs is the succession process, especially the transfer of leadership roles. In order to acquire the knowledge of how to prepare to the successful transfer the owners need to know more and more about the essential processes of the business transfer. The aim of our research is to investigate the succession process of SMEs from the point of view of ownership types. We investigated the leadership succession differences between family businesses and non-family businesses, and the differences based on the majority of ownership (Hungarian majority or foreign majority). We applied principal component analysis to investigate the process of succession and analysis of variance to investigate the differences according to aspects of ownership. The results show that the Hungarian SMEs and family businesses are less experienced in the leadership transfer than their foreign counterparts or non-family businesses.