Women Entrepreneurs

Developing Leadership for Success

Sandra J. Wells, Stuart Bruchey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135658212
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First Published in 1998. Female entrepreneurs represent a rapidly growing element of corporate America, as evidenced in The National Women's Business Council's 1991 Annual Report to the President of the United States and Congress. Given that so much of the business of America is composed of organizations started and run by women, a sobering statistic presented in the same report attests to the failure rate of these businesses: women-owned businesses fail at a rate seven to eleven percent higher than businesses owned by men. Given the theoretical foundation of the nature of adult learning, this research explored the phenomenon of learning for a select group of adult learners, a group of successful female entrepreneurs.

IV

The Data

Introduction

The purpose of this research was to explore the phenomenon of learning of successful women entrepreneurs as described by the women themselves, a group of Texas business women: what they learned and how they learned in their lives. Further, I was interested in exploring the acquisition and enhancement of leadership skills among these women and in how they described this process. The research population consisted of eighteen female entrepreneurs who own Texas businesses with gross revenues of over $1 million and with over ten employees. The study used an unstructured interview methodology.

This study was not an analysis of the effectiveness of the learning or the effectiveness of the leadership skills of those interviewed.

Research Protocol

The women participants were asked two basic questions:

1. How did you get to your current position as the CEO/President of this organization?

2. What do you do in your role as the head of this organization?

The first question enabled the interviewee to trace the behaviors and actions that they had undertaken in the past that led them to their present role as the business leader. The second question focused the entrepreneur on the behaviors and practices in her current role. Both questions employed an ethnobiographical approach to collecting the research data. The data obtained were rich in historical perspective: most of the women traced the kinds of activities and experiences of the past, often starting their biography with their childhood. Through the “story” of these entrepreneurial women’s lives, I was able to derive information about their families, the role of childhood experiences which shaped their attitudes and behaviors, the significant relationships in their lives, their previous work experiences and startup of their current business, their personal goals and values, and knowledge of self as these all related to the way they led and learned in their organizations.

The “telling ourselves a story about ourselves” is an important element of feminist research, deriving theory from the experiences of the interview (Cotterill and Letherby, 1993). The narrative technique, such as the one used in this research, allows respondents to “tell the story” in whichever way they choose, and “importantly, validates individual experience and provides a vehicle through which this experience can be expressed to a wider audience (Ibid, p. 74).

The women in this study were open in discussing their life stories. I believe the content was honestly delivered and that the frankness of these women is testimony to the validity of their input. Two of the women spoke of how they had compromised their own sense of ethics and one woman spoke of the confidential nature of her company’s growth plans (“off the record”). The interviews were characterized by a good deal of “run-on” or stream of consciousness discussion as the women talked about themselves, with an occasional interruption or interjection from me in support of their discussion.

I indicated at the start of the interview that, although I was not using a long list of research questions, I would engage the interviewee for elaboration or explanation of any points which might merit further exploration. These questions were spontaneous and based on the information provided during the interview. They were questions of clarification, i.e. “Could you describe what that first job was like?” and since they were situational for each interviewee, they were not uniformly postulated.

The research identified how these women have engaged in learning throughout their lives to acquire skills not only in leadership but in other aspects of their lives as well. The women followed a model of learning from experience: they clearly could define experiences that provided foundations for their future actions. The women were also self-directed in that clear patterns emerged in the analysis of how they have taken the responsibility to learn on their own with little or no external direction.

The following analyses are based on data acquired from the interviews. The first set of data presented provides demographic information, which was gathered in the interview. The data examining the phenomenon of learning in the researched group follows the demographic data.

Demographic Data

The women in this study ranged in age from 34 to 77 years of age at the time of their interview. Eleven of the women were in their forties. The women either volunteered their age readily during the course of the interview or broadly made references to the decade of their age.

The women in the interview supplied demographic information relative to their birth order and family structure. Eight of the women interviewed for this study were first born or sole child of their family. The women in this study primarily came from families with intact nuclear families, where the mother was a homemaker and the father was sole provider of financial support. A widower father raised one entrepreneur with support from a paternal grandmother and another was raised by a divorced mother who completed graduate work while the participant was a young child. For these entrepreneurial women, there was no single parent who exerted special influence: most spoke of strong mothers and fathers and one spoke of a role model aunt. Of the group, seven had siblings who were successful professionals or executives in other organizations. Three of the women started their businesses in the same field or industry as their father or father and mother; only one of the women had an entrepreneurial parent.

Of the women in the study, fifteen had been or were married, thirteen had children, and six had children who joined their mother’s business as either employees or executives.

The women described their family backgrounds as follows:

I grew up in a household with a mother who is a schoolteacher (I was the oldest child) and a father who was a machinist in Massachusetts, who had to have a second job to be able to put us through school. My mother always taught first or second grade so she was always home … just a real blue collar background, church on Sundays, be good to the neighbors. It’s a town of 25, 000, Gloucester, Massachusetts, still 25, 000 today.

There were four of us; I was the youngest, by a lot of years. It was almost like being the only child … My parents farmed … sharecropped a farm most of my life.

I was the oldest of five children. I grew up in a town of about 1, 500 people in the middle of Kansas, very isolated. There are now five generations growing up in that town, so everybody is related. My parents are typical blue-collar workers … My parents are both hard workers, neither one of them being educated, both of them dropped out of school. They are not lower middle class; they are probably in the lower class. My mother and dad were very young, they were raising themselves and they had other children.

I come from a large family in a very small town and from a family that was prominent. I would say that everyone in my family was pretty ambitious. Having been raised as Southern ladies, the girls in my family, my sisters and I, several of us, by circuitous routes to realizing how ambitious. In my family, we had an attorney, two doctors, a college professor, a speech pathologist, and a software manager for a major database, a company president, and I have a sister who is still in graduate school undergoing a transition right now.

My father was the supervisor of a lumberyard back home. I have a sister older (47), I’m 44, and I have a brother that is 8 years younger, and I have a sister that is 10 years younger. The tradition that my family was as a Hispanic family, my father was very secure as a man and was not the macho man, pushing, resisting, and controlling. The macho picture was insecurity. I always explain that my father was very secure.

My dad was an agronomist with the University of Florida, a full professor but he never taught his first class until the late ‘60’s. He had been in research basically. He taught an occasional class period but he never taught a whole semester long class. And my mother was a full-time housewife. It was … we were a family of the 50’s. Father goes to work, doesn’t earn a lot of money but makes enough to keep the family together. Mother stays home, takes care of the children, in our case it was four girls instead of three boys … er, two boys (referring to “Ozzie and Harriet” television show).

I’m a third generation real estate-oriented individual. My father was a laborer. He did milking for farms for most of his life. And, in the later part of his life, he worked as a construction worker. Mom was a homemaker. All of my family comes from a very poor background, in fact, most of our relatives are in Monterrey (Mexico). And, that’s where I was bom.

My family’s background was working class. I come from, my mother’s side, my grandfather worked for Humble Oil, worked on the tank farm, and there were four daughters on my mother’s family and my father was the son of two Polish immigrants, and his father was killed when he was eight months old. And so, they were both good-hearted people, they wanted better for me. Of the eight cousins, there were seven boys and myself on the Southern side; that’s where my father wound up living, because my grandmother’s bar and restaurant place was in Brooklyn in a rough neighborhood and he adopted the South. I was the only child.

I am the youngest of five; my husband is the oldest of five. I had a sister who was domineering, I had three big brothers who loved my sister and I to death and told us what we could do, and who we could date.

My mother was a certified lab technician, she had also gone to Rice and met my father and they got married … Unfortunately, my father dropped dead at 36 with a major heart attack which had a major impact on my mother, a widow with four kids. He was a chemical and a mechanical engineer out of Rice University and when he passed away, he was designing and manufacturing the heat shield to the Apollo capsule. I was thirteen, oldest of the four.

My mom is a behavioral psychologist so I had a lot of motivational research done on me – achievement motivation, natural motivation skills. Just vicariously from living with her.

She had worked with Tina Homer, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, superstars; she was getting her Ph.D. with Bryn Mawr. My father was an executive vice president with Company X; he retired just this year.

Formal Education

Of the women interviewed for this study, four participants had completed a baccalaureate degree in a “traditional” post high school model. One subsequently completed an MBA at the University of Texas in an Option II program which enables full-time employment during matriculation. Another entrepreneur had a doctorate in linguistics and had taught at a state university in the linguistics department. One participant had a baccalaureate degree awarded by a university in Austin, which granted extensive credit for life experiences and successful completion of course work. Another returned to a four-year institution to complete a degree after a divorce and being primary caretaker for two children. Nine of those interviewed did attend a four-year university or college for no more than two years. One participant did not complete high school but did attain a GED. The remaining three did not attend post high school formal education.

Business Background

The women in the study were business owners in a variety of industries. Only one woman could be said to be in an industry that was predominantly populated by women: she was the owner of a beauty-related organization. She met the criteria for the study and had developed a large organization, one that is unique for the level of quality related innovations.

Three of the women were in the computer industry: one business owner had been trained as a nurse but now had changed to the technical world of computers. Another was in the technical field of software development. A third was the head of a semiconductor-related manufacturing business. These women had had training in computer applications for both software and hardware. These three women had received accolades from the Austin Business Community for their successes in entrepreneurial e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• I. The Study Introduction
• II. Review of the Literature
• III. Methodology of Study
• IV. The Data
• V. Discussion of Findings, Conclusions, and Implications of this Study
• Appendix A: Description of the Women Participants
• Appendix B: Demographics of Participants
• Appendix C: Interview Guide
• Appendix D: Categorizing
• Appendix E: Categories Which Arose from Interview Data
• Appendix F: Relationship of Units of Analysis and Categories
• Bibliography
• Index