PROACTIVENESS, COMPETITIVE AGGRESSIVENESS AND AUTONOMY: A COMPARATIVE STUDY FROM THE CZECH REPUBLIC

Abstract

The purpose of this comparative study is to explore the differences in the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) between micro versus small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We have selected three dimensions of EO (proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness and autonomy) for our analysis. We have analyzed the data collected from 1141 respondents during the period of 2015 from 14 regions of the Czech Republic, which consists of 740 micro firms and 401 small and medium firms. Empirical results of our paper show significant differences between micro versus small and medium enterprises in terms of proactiveness and autonomy. However, we can only partially confirm that micro firms are statistically different from the SMEs in terms of competitive aggressiveness.  Thus, our paper enables  better understanding of the EO from the firm size perspective, when they have different levels of resources.