Non-economic Organizational Performance of SMEs: Is There a Rationale for a Cognitive Entrepreneur?

This chapter contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship and small business management by testing the relationship between the non-economic organizational performance and the individual entrepreneurship capacity and by providing new insights about the need for promoting a truly cognitive entrepreneur. Toward the use of individual data relative to the founder or owner of SMEs, we assess the relationships between the non-economic performance of Portuguese SMEs and three types of capital: human, social, and organizational. It uses collaborators’ satisfaction as a metrics for non-economic performance and provides new insights for improving SMEs’ performance. The results provided the identification of four principal factors, which include all the types of individual capital considered in the analysis. The estimation of logistic regressions points out that only two factors present significant influences on the non-economic performance of SMEs. On the one hand, in terms of the factor 3, although it is capable of influencing negatively, in global terms, the non-economic performance of SMEs, it can be enhanced that interdepartmental meetings have a significant and positive influence on non-economic performance of SMEs. On the other hand, the analysis of the factor 4 reveals equally a global negative influence, although the human capital and cognitive variables that represent the entrepreneur’s intuition and competences of human resources are capable of influencing positively the behavior of the answer variable concerning non-economic performance of SMEs.