기업가 특성이 성장통에 미치는 영향에 관한 실증연구

After their first introduction in the mid 1980s, venture firms have played an important role in the economic growth of Korea. More than 150 Korean venture firms have experienced annual sales of ‘100 billion Korean won.' Their industries are also very diverse from manufacturing to bio-technology. Behind this success story, however, Korea also witnessed many disastrous cases of venture firms which went to bankruptcy, even though some of them enjoyed a very successful launch. Why does this happen? Why do ‘once’ successful venture firms with a very rapid-growth rate disappear after an abrupt internal challenge? Flamholtz and Randle proposed an important direction in explaining this disastrous phenomenon of failed venture firms who enjoyed an initial success. They suggested that the issue of managing ‘growing pains’ would be a remedy for overcoming these challenges. In short, an early observation and proper management of growing pains is critical in preventing future risks. Interests in ‘growing pains’ were initially started from medical field, defining it as “Maladies de la Croissance (成長病)” in 1823. Several management researchers begin to accepts this term of growing pains recently. Flamholtz and Randle wrote a book of ‘Growing Pains,' arguing that it is 'discrepancies between organization growth and organization’s managerial capability' and that all organizations go through growing pains at any stage of their growth. This means that ‘growing pains’ is a symptom that a firm’s growth rate is so fast that it cannot be managed properly by old system and current managerial capabilities. Thus, new systems and infrastructure is needed for sustainable growth of a firm, and if a firm does not give a proper attention to this, it might face a big challenge. Some Korean researchers also try to define growing pains. Han argued that growing pains occur when an organization does not have the management skills appropriate for growth. Adapting and modifying from the previous research, we define growing pains conceptually as a ‘situation of chaos caused by the short of managerial capability to cope with unexpected challenges when a firm grows fast.' There also have been several attempts in explaining the causes of growing pains. Flamholtz and Randle presents that symptoms of growing pains are caused by absence of strategy and cooperation, vagueness of vision, lack of commutation, and internal disturbance among employees. These are all caused by the absence of capability of management. Therefore, in order to properly manage growing pains, we can conclude that a firm must enhance its internal managerial capabilities. Despite its practical implications and importance, studies on growing pains have only been limited to the theoretical level with a number of publications. In this research, we empirically measure growing pains of firms, using data from Korean venture firms. Furthermore, we suggest major causes of growing pains theoretically and empirically test their impact on the magnitude of growing pains. By doing so, this research is expected to help provide guidelines in preventing growing pains and lead to sustainable performance of fast- growing firms. Most entrepreneurs played critical and various roles in managing firms. They directly involve and participate in major managerial issues of their firms. Thus, the characteristics of entrepreneur him/herself are studied as a vital factor in understanding firm growth. This can be more true in venture businesses where an entrepreneur has a bigger importance on firm performance than any other cases of established firms. Thus, we can conclude that characteristics of an entrepreneur seem to have a strong relationship on the performance of a firm. We developed three major characteristics of entrepreneurs which might impact on growing pains; management experience, technological experience and personal networking of an entrepreneur. Management experiences include necessary knowledge needed to managing the firm, such as planning, human resource, marketing, and finance experience. They, in particular, play a critical role in the introduction stage of a firm. This is why many researchers have emphasized the management experience as a key factor in firm performance of the growth stage. If the entrepreneur has affluent management experiences, it is most likely that the firm can be managed well in the various area of management such as vision sharing, strategic planning, human resource management, finance and marketing. Based on this, we argue that the management experiences of an entrepreneur have negative relationship with the growing pains of a venture firm. Also, many researches argue that a technological experience is vital to the venture firm's success. This means that the technological experiences of an entrepreneur make a firm more market, product, and technology-friendly. This is particularly important in a venture firm where many firms are started based on entrepreneur's past technological and industrial experiences. Prior technological experience of an entrepreneur would be an important asset for a firm in understanding new and emerging technologies or managing employees with technology background. These experiences will ultimately help prevent growing pains. This leads to our second argument that technological experiences of an entrepreneur reduces growing pains of a venture firm. Furthermore, when a firm faced challenges, entrepreneur's personal network could provide a big help. An example would be the active use of mentors: firms with mentors have been proved to achieve more success than firms that do not. Also, networking can help firms in anticipating problems related to growing pains, and find relevant solutions. In addition, we expect this effect of personal network is stronger in a country of which national culture values cooperation and collectivism, such as Korea. Based on this, we argue that entrepreneur’s personal networking have negative relationship with the growing pains of a venture firm. In order to test the effect of entrepreneur characteristics on growing pains, data is collected from the rapidly growing venture firms in Korea, which listed on the Korea Venture Business Association. 800 questionnaires were distributed, 183 were returned. Final sample size is 109 and analyzed to test this study's hypothesis. The results of the empirical analysis show that prior managerial experiences and networking of an entrepreneur have a significantly negative relationship with growing pains, but the technological experiences of an entrepreneur does not. These findings show that the prior experiences and characteristics of an entrepreneur are critical factors in managing growing pains, which cause many problems to fast-growing venture firms. This research has several contributions, theoretically and practically. First, this study provides more concrete definition on growing pains and empirically tests it. It is very meaningful in the current situation of having limited theoretical foundations on the topic of growing pains. Second, symptoms of growing pains made by Flamholtz and Randle were based on the US firms, however, the same symptoms were found in Korean firms. It shows that this study can be used as a common ground for the global firms which grow fast and expose to the challenge of growing pains. Third, previous studies had been limited on the issues of relationship between growing pains and performance and they were never related with the causes of growing pains. However, this study tries to find out the causes of growing pains and empirically test it. This is important in that it shows some prevention and lessening methods of growing pains. With these theoretical insights, we think that this research can provide some practical insights as well. We expect the theoretical research would go on this challenging topic and give more implications for the struggling ventures.