ANTECEDENTS AND ELEMENTS REINFORCING COMPETITIVENESS OF COMMUNITY ENTERPRISES IN UPPER NORTH OF THAILAND
The community enterprise concept is the grassroot economic development strategy to develop people’s quality of life. Its business operation is run by each community itself and related to the production of products and provision of services. The establishment is initiated by the integration of the group of persons who are involved and have a common way of life on the purpose of generating income and for self-reliance of the family community. However, the development of community enterprise remains faces many problems and lack of capability and competitiveness. Consequently, this research aims to 1) examine the level of the following antecedents; creative leadership, participation, strategic management, organizational culture and competitiveness of the community enterprises in upper North of Thailand, 2) explore the influence of such antecedents; creative leadership, participation, strategic management and organizational culture towards the competitiveness of the community enterprises in upper North of Thailand, and 3) develop the model of reinforcing the competitiveness of the community enterprises in upper North of Thailand. The mixed research method between quantitative and qualitative terms was conducted. In view of the quantitative term, the sample group consisted of 440 entrepreneurs from the community enterprises, at outstanding level, in upper North of Thailand whereas the sampling size was defined based on the multi-stage sampling method with 20-time criteria of the observed variables. Data collection was conducted through questionnaires that were later analyzed by the structural equation modelling. For the qualitative term, an in-depth interview was made with the target group of 20 informants that were entrepreneurs of the community enterprises, at outstanding level, in upper North of Thailand. The findings revealed that 1) creative leadership, participation, strategic management, organizational culture and competitiveness of the community enterprises in upper North of Thailand were all at high level, 2) creative leadership, participation, strategic management, and organizational culture influenced the competitiveness of the community enterprises in upper North of Thailand with statistical significance level of .05, and 3) the model for reinforcing the competitiveness of the community enterprises in upper North of Thailand as developed by the researcher was called “C P S O Model” (C = Creative Leadership, P =Participation, S =Strategic Management, O =Organization Culture, respectively). Addition to this, in view of qualitative findings, it was found that to enhance the success of community enterprises in upper North of Thailand, the entrepreneurs were required to provide qualified products and services at international standard, reduce unnecessary costs and errors at work to increase competitiveness. The entrepreneurs of community enterprises can further apply the research findings of this study as a guideline for differentiating their products and services to be more remarkable and valuable that will lead to creative and innovative strategy on provision of products and services having more value proposition than competitors affecting reinforcement of the community enterprises’ competitiveness and income generation to community members for their stable and sustainable self-reliance.
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