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SMEs play a vital role in the development of national economies. But these businesses encounter with several barriers when performing this role. To cope with these impediments, some entrepreneurial attitudes that are dimensions of Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO), namely, competitive aggressiveness and autonomy enable SMEs to achieve better performance levels by increasing their revenues and income. However, depending on the characteristics of SMEs these behaviors might differ. In this regard, the purpose of this paper is to determine and examine whether competitive aggressiveness and autonomy of SMEs differ depending on their age and size or not. To fulfil this aim, the researcher has collected data from 479 SMEs in Turkey by employing a questionnaire survey. To find differences between characteristics of firms regarding selected entrepreneurial attitudes, Independent sample T-test is applied. According to the results, competitive aggressiveness of SMEs does not differ depending on their age and size. But while autonomy of smaller and larger SMEs does not differ, older SMEs have more autonomy comparing to their younger counterparts. The reasons of those result might stem from firmentrepreneurial level characteristics of SMEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the executives of SMEs have a crucial part in decision and strategy making processes, their entrepreneurial attitudes related with Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO), might enable them to perform better in achieving their firms' targets, growth and success. In this sense, this research purposes to determine and compare EO of executives of SMEs from various countries by concentrating their gender, age and education. To achieve this goal, the researchers separately collected data from 1620 executives of Czech and Turkish SMEs and Mann-Whitney U test was performed to make analyses for this study. The findings corroborate that Czech executives are more proactive and aggressive in competition than Turkish executives while Turkish executives are more autonomous. Except differences between younger Czech and Turkish executives, risk taking behaviours do not change among the executives. Lastly, Turkish male and older executives take more innovative actions than their Czech counterparts. The reasons for these findings might be clarified with cultural differences, market structure, level of corruption, propensity to apply patents, public spending on childcare and assertive behaviours of executives. Some policy implementations for policy makers and other organizations are also offered by the researchers to eliminate differences in EO of the executives and SMEs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project has multiple purposes: (1) to develop a representative sample of private sector firms in Turkey through truly probabilistic sampling processes, (2) based on this sample, to explore the general profiles of firms in Turkey in terms of three organizational culture elements identified in the literature as key drivers of superior firm performance; namely, Market Orientation, Learning Orientation, and Entrepreneurial Orientation, (3) to examine the effects of these cultural factors, on their Innovative Capacity, and (4) to further examine the joint effects of cultural orientations and Innovative Capacity on aspects of long-term firm performance. To these ends, a sample of 441 firms has been developed and data have been collected from the managers and employees of these firms (2720 questionnaires). The data have been analyzed in order to test the hypothesized relationships across the study constructs, and several insights have been derived. Foremost, the results indicate that the three cultural orientations are very strong determinants of Innovative Capacity and a number of performance indicators, including long-term profitability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]