Participative leadership in small businesses

Abstract

This paper presents some ideas on the concept of participative leadership as a behavioral interpretative framework to understand the specificity of small businesses owner’s organizational role. To that point the paper begins with a review of the general characteristics of Organizational Behavior Management and its analysis and intervention tools. From there, the paper presents an analysis of the way in which the concept of participative leadership can create a conceptual connection to such tools and bring about an understanding of the specificity of leadership in such business. The empirical functions proposed to understand such specificity are: a) innovation actions; b) feedback conditions; and c) operation exemplar. The paper concludes with an emphasis on an equal recognition of such functions and suggests the development of a formula for the quantitative measurement of each function´s weight on a general parameter of participative leadership viewed as a competence.