The Entrepreneur Personality, Partner Types And Firm Performance

For SMEs, innovation resource is the key to obtain competitive advantage, with the help of external resources to promote the innovation and development of enterprises has become an important strategic arrangement of many small and medium enterprises. Different types of partners have different effects on enterprise innovation and performance.Entrepreneurs in SMEs is the core of talent resources, which also is the key strength for the enterprise, will promote the enterprise reform. Social Network for SMEs is usually caused by individual entrepreneurs build social networks at beginning. Therefore, entrepreneurs’ personality, work style, ideas will affect corporate social network structure and the cooperation between companies and external organizations, ultimately affect the ability to obtain innovation resources and competitive advantage.in a competitive market environment.Therefore, this paper conducted a survey of SMEs in Zhejiang Province, invite corporate senior managers and R&D personnel to complete the questionnaire by telephone. Ultimately, we got 119 valid questionnaires, and the samples cover 11 cities in Zhejiang Province, which are all manufacturing companies. According to the leadership trait theory, social capital theory, resource-based view theory and transaction cost theory, use structural equation modeling approach, from two personality perspective which called entrepreneurs agreeableness and extraversion, analyzes the relationship between entrepreneurs’character and different types of organizations, thus analyze the effects between different types of business partners with innovation capability and organizational performance.The results showed that, extraversion entrepreneurs and agreeableness entrepreneurs have the positive effect on the relationship between upstream enterprises, downstream enterprises and universities, research institutions, the agreeableness entrepreneurs have the positive effect on the relationship between rival, but the extraversion entrepreneurs not. The relationship with upstream enterprise and downstream enterprise have a significant positive impact on innovation ability and organizational performance, the relationship with universities and research institutions have positive effects on innovation ability, but don’t have impact on organizational performance, while the relationship with rival have a negative significant impact on enterprise innovation ability, and have no impact on organizational performance; innovation ability have a significant positive impact on organizational performance.The results show that entrepreneurs’ personality traits affect the external resources accessing, the agreeableness, extraversion personality affects the contact with potential partners, and social network is an important determinants of innovation. Therefore, we must realize that the entrepreneur is a key element to promote enterprise development cooperation networks and enhance innovation performance, we need to train entrepreneurs’ excellent sound character, make full use of social network resources, and strengthen the relationship with cooperation competitors.