Leadership and Organizational Culture in the Sustainability of Subsistence Small Businesses: an Intellectual Capital Based View

Abstract

The concept of leadership is complex and has been studied from multiple approaches, especially from the psychological field and from the field of management. Small businesses created as way of subsistence for the entrepreneur and their family present a limited leadership. The cultural traditions of the forestry industry are based on the culture and indigenous know-how of the territory, especially affecting small timber businesses, the small businesses working in timber activities. This paper analyzed the interrelation between culture and leadership in the process of generating performance from sustainable competitive advantages using partial least squares (PLS) techniques. The results show that culture and leaderships are sources of competitive advantage in subsistence small businesses, but culture does not generate competitiveness directly; an organizational culture needs to act through entrepreneurial leadership.