Journal of Enterprising Culture

This study explores the differences in communication styles adopted by leaders and designers during the processes of design and development of a product in the specific organizational context of micro-enterprises operating in the design industry in Taiwan. To that end, both quantitative and qualitative studies were conducted using the Communication Styles Inventory (CSI) scale. The data were gathered from both questionnaires and crossed interviews conducted with 10 leaders and 22 designers belonging to 9 industrial design micro-enterprises. The knowledge of the differences in communication styles adopted by leaders and designers provides both theoretical and practical insights into the following question: how should a leader “fit” their communication styles with a designer communication styles to enhance communication performance during the product design and the development phase.

While the goals of long term sustainability and survival were thoroughly studied in family firms’ literature, to the best of our knowledge, rare studies had investigated the influence of values on the capacity of family firms to be resilient. In addition, this likely relationship is highly contingent on cultural and national contexts, as family values – on which family business values are dependent – are not the same across countries and World regions. These theoretical and empirical gaps motivated the present research which aims at investigating the probable influence of family firms’ values on the resilience of these firms in the unique context of Tunisia.

This qualitative research is based on a body of discourse collected from nine managers belonging to five Tunisian family businesses. Our research allowed us to highlight some key family business values in a new underexplored setting that is an oriental country with a culture driven by Islamic and Arab values. More importantly, our analysis shows that family values underlie both community and business values. Finally, our results underscore the importance of business values, community values and family values in the resilience of the firms studied.

Information overload syndrome has been recognized as a widespread problem in enterprises. Despite the profound research on information overload syndrome, there has rarely been research that empirically and separately identifies two important attributes of information overload syndrome, information overload and interaction overload. In this paper, the empirical research with survey data identifies information overload and interaction overload separately and measures some other factors that may correlate to them differently. The research results indicate that information overload and interaction overload may be identified separately, and there are factors that may correlate to them differently. Such results will help the entrepreneurs for better management practice, especially to alleviate information overload syndrome in an enterprise in different ways corresponding to whether the syndrome is from information overload or interaction overload.

Women’s entrepreneurship has taken its position in the sphere of entrepreneurship research as well as in the business world. Several features and attributes characterize and distinguish women entrepreneurs across countries. This paper aims at identifying and discerning the various factors influencing the entrepreneurial career of Tunisian women entrepreneurs and the impediments they face. For this, a qualitative exploratory study was conducted with a sample of 23 women entrepreneurs in Tunisia. This study shows the existence of several factors spurring the entrepreneurial career of the women entrepreneurs, including personal, social and environmental factors as well as following obstacles.