The Effect of Simultaneous Interaction of the Entrepreneurial Orientation and the Leader’s Psychological Traits on the Performance of SMEs

This research work investigates the simultaneous interaction of entrepreneurial orientation dimensions of the firm with the leader’s psychological factors for a better explanation of SMEs’ performance. The universal and contingency approach are reductionist and do not allow us to achieve the research objective. So, to study the simultaneous interaction between a great number of variables, we are mobilizing for this purpose the configurational approach and particularly, the perspective of alignment (fit) as “configuration”. Indeed, we are pursuing a quantitative methodological approach and conducting a field survey through a research questionnaire distributed to 100 industrial Tunisian SMEs. The results of this research reveal a taxonomy of four configurations of industrial Tunisian SMEs significantly different from each other and which have different effects on performance. The configurations are named, the “Leader”, the “Creative”, the “Ambitious” and the “Conservative”.