management support and the performance of entrepreneurial start-ups

MANAGEMENT SUPPORT
Finally, the subjective evaluation of the contribution of management support to the success of
the companies in the sample shows that 38.7 percent of the respondents believed that management
support had a positive, or even a very positive, impact on their company’s performance.
At the same time, 47.2 percent stated that management support had no eff ect at all, and 14.1
percent even saw negative or very negative consequences of management support.
Th e evaluation of the quality of management support off ered by venture capital fi rms is
normally distributed among the companies in the sample. 34.3 percent of the respondents
rated the quality of management support as either good or very good. 23.6 evaluated it as
satisfactory, but 41.5 percent of the respondents believed that the management support
off ered by their VC partner was either barely suffi cient or even insuffi cient (Figure 2 ).
Figure 2: Evaluation of the quality of management support
SBR 59 April 2007 138-159 147
Th e descriptive overview of the sample shows that both the perceived quality of management
support and the diff erent performance indicators are more or less normally distributed
among the companies in the sample. Th erefore, we want to know how the two sets
of variables are correlated.
4.2 ANALYSIS OF CORRELATIONS
To analyze the relationship between the quality of the management support off ered by
VC fi rms and the performance of entrepreneurial start-ups, we compute rank correlations.
Figure 3 shows the corresponding matrix of correlation coeffi cients. Th e matrix indicates,
fi rst of all, that the performance measures are hardly correlated with each other. Only