Abstract

HERNANDEZ FERNANDEZ, Lissette. Essential Competences for Small and Medium Family Enterprises: A Model for Business Success. Revista de Ciencias Sociales [online]. 2007, vol.13, n.2, pp.249-263. ISSN 1315-9518.

Family businesses have become in actuality an important motor for world economies, since they are the most numerous business structures in the whole world: they represent 90% of the business field and contribute 50% of the Gross National Product (GNP) and employment (Gersick et al, 1997; Upton and Petty, 2000 and Amat 1998). These facts show the need to study an important sector of this type of business, the SMEs (small and medium enterprises), and thereby understand their dynamic, in order to design proposals reinforcing their competitiveness and sustainability over time. This article presents a model based on essential competences for the success of family SMBs, understanding essential competences as a set of differential characteristics or qualifications that an individual has, which can be of two (2) types: innate and acquired, learned or developed (also call knowledge competences). The research design was non-experimental, of a bibliographical or documentary character with a descriptive type of study. To develop the model, theoretical contributions of the following authors were used: in the area of “family business” (Amat, 1998; Gersick, Davis, McCollom, and Lansberg, 1997; Gallo, 1997; Neubauer and Lank, 1998), and related to “knowledge management” (Polanyi, 1975; Nonaka, 2000; Davenport and Prusak, 1998; and Dewey, 1991). The main conclusion affirms that essential competences are those that support the business’s key processes, because they generate added value, constituting the true essence of success and competitiveness.

Keywords : Small and Medium Enterprises (SME); family enterprises; model of three circles; knowledge spiral; essential competences; competitiveness; business success.