PERSONAL AND BUSINESS VALUES IN SMEs: WHAT GENERAL VALUE CONCEPTS DO MANAGERS AND BUSINESS OWNERS OF SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISES APPRECIATE MOST?

Doing business is no longer only making profits. Today, organisations are confronted with different normative expectations from their environment and are expected to behave in a socially responsible way. How small and medium-sized enterprises perceive the normative expectations and how they deal with them in their everyday business lives were the questions of the research conducted in spring 2006. Following the concept of values and value orientations, we argue here that human behaviour in general and business decision in particular are strongly influenced by values. We assume that the personal value orientations of the mangers and business owners in a small and medium-sized enterprise are particularly important for the entrepreneurial activity of the company because it is the owner or the directing manager who usually fulfils the executive duties. Therefore we asked the owners and managers of about 500 SMEs in the Liberec region, the Czech part of the Euroregion Nisa about their personal values and their perceptions of normative conflicts. This paper discusses selected empirical findings of the broader research on “Attitudes of SMEs towards ethical values in the Euroregion Nisa ” conducted in co-operation between the International Graduate School Zittau (Germany) and the Technical University in Liberec (Czech Republic) in the period of March – September 2006