Management Guidelines for the Success of Small and Medium Enterprises in Thai Garment Industry

Abstract

   This study aims to investigate leadership characteristics, business strategies, succession plan, and to discover the guidelines for developing success management of SMEs in Thai garment industry. The study employed mixed method integrating quantitative and qualitative approach by examining the primary data through in-depth interviews with 5 executives in SME companies who showed successful achievement in Thai garment industry. The questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data from 324 samples recruited from Thai garment industry SMEs by multistage sampling technique. For qualitative data, the in-depth interview data was transcribed, interpreted and captured key issues related to the research objectives and conceptual framework. For quantitative data, the questionnaire data was analyzed by descriptive statistics for percentage, standard deviation, and mean while Pearson 's correlation was used to test the hypotheses.
   The results found that the factors showing relationship with the success of SME companies in Thai garment industry at the high level for each aspect were noted. That is, the characteristics of leaders involved concentration on individual relationship; the business strategy involved expansion; the business succession involved family business leaders requiring blood ties. The guidelines for developing success management of SMEs involve leadership development that must have desirable behavioral characteristics, accumulated expertise in the profession in order to develop their potential in job performance, harmonized teamwork by building relationship with team members, showing integrity in morality and ethics in their profession by focusing on public interests rather than personal gains.