A construção de estratégias de crescimento por empreendedoras : estudo de casos múltiplos em empresas de alto crescimento

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is recognized as an instrument of development and economic growth, especially in emerging economies such as Brazil, where women entrepreneurs already represent most of the initial enterprises (GEM, 2016), but on the other hand the literature of female entrepreneurship has been raising, based on in predominantly quantitative studies, that women's companies have a slower growth compared to their male counterparts, and there are still few studies that examine growth from their strategies and qualitative differences. Thus, this research sought to analyze the strategies of growth built by women entrepreneurs in companies that presented high growth period and, with this, to increase the understanding of the phenomenon. To achieve this goal, an analytical model was built based on the theoretical framework aiming to guide the analysis in three dimensions: individual, enterprise and environment. The study is of a qualitative nature, the research strategy was the study of multiple cases, the evidences were collected through semi-structured interviews with the owners, documents and direct observation. The analysis was carried out using a technique called cross-case analysis, used to examine similarities and differences between cases. The main results are: in the individual dimension, the entrepreneurial intensity is not related to the time in hours, but to the efficiency of the use of this time achieved by a high degree of professionalism in management, self-knowledge and emotional intelligence; in the enterprise dimension, more strategy-oriented women entrepreneurs have promoted, more peculiar ways of combining resources; in the environment dimension, constant monitoring promoted innovations for the company and especially for the market. It was also emphasized that the forms of analysis of a potential growth opportunity were predominantly intuitive and subjective factors such as risk of affecting reputation, legacy, emotion, and spirituality influenced the decision to explore the growth opportunities around the firm. Finally, in a noneconomic perspective, business growth, for them, does not dissociate the personal growth, the quality of life of workers and the social welfare.