ENTREPRENEURIAL SKILLS AND SATISFACTION WITH PERFORMANCE: A STUDY WITH INCUBATED COMPANIES

In the current organizational context, the business environment has required managers to act proactively in identifying opportunities and threats, in order to obtain information and formulate strategies to assist in the decision-making process. To compete in this type of environment, adopting an entrepreneurial approach in the elaboration of strategies becomes an essential factor for the success of companies. In this perspective, the individual must be prepared to face the informational and globalized world, an act that requires both knowing how to do and knowing how to be. These imperatives are essential for survival, contextualized in learning to learn and can be translated into the practice of generating organizational growth through recursive mechanisms of skills formation. The present study, carried out with managers of companies installed in incubators, aimed to analyze the relationship of entrepreneurial skills in satisfying the performance of organizations. Organizational responses are quite heterogeneous, even when entrepreneurs face similar pressures. Entrepreneurial guidance was used as a mediating variable to explain this heterogeneity. For this purpose, a survey was conducted with a questionnaire, which resulted in 107 respondents from 11 cities in the State of Santa Catarina, Brazil. The collected data were processed with statistical techniques, using structural equation modeling with maximum approximation likelihood methods. The results indicate that the entrepreneurial orientation positively influences the enterprises in the performance satisfaction. Since entrepreneurial skills inhibit the adoption of entrepreneurial orientation practices. Entrepreneurial orientations are able to explain the reason for the heterogeneity of the entrepreneurs' responses. Thus, the findings are intended to provide alternatives for solving some managerial difficulties that arise in newly formed companies, in particular, when understanding the relationships between some personal and organizational characteristics with performance. Finally, the social contribution can be linked with the knowledge that managers of business incubators can acquire and use in order to analyze or restructure the management capacity of financial and human resources based on the relationships researched in the incubated companies.