The Impact of the Alignment of Strategy and Managerial Characteristics on Spanish Smes

Current scholarship has failed to establish a clear relationship between the influence of the manager and the success of a small-to-medium-enterprise (SME).This study investigated the relationship between the characteristics of a firm's managers and the development of entrepreneurial behavior in the company in terms of manager tenure, age, formal education, functional experience, and coalignment and success. A sample of 233 Spanish firms with 5 to 500 employees was surveyed in 1997. The tri-partite research model emphasized individual characteristics, strategy, and success, incorporating coalignment as the independent variable. The model has made a significant contribution in explaining the process by which an organization's leader influences its outcomes. Results indicated that neither age nor tenure explains the manager's type of strategic behavior. However, the study demonstrated that the coalignment between managerial characteristics and strategy had significant success implications for entrepreneurial managers.The lower the coalignment between the ideal and the observed managerial attributes, the lower the organizational success.(LMH)