Abstract

With their limited resources, family controlled small enterprises are especially vulnerable to the catastrophic consequences of crisis events. Crises may emerge in private as well as entrepreneurial spheres. Although crises may be of different origin, like political, environmental, social, legal, psychological, or economical origin, they usually incite the psychological processes of the stakeholders of the enterprise. Consequently, various biases may influence decision making, and crises therefore cannot be analyzed and evaluated by economic analyses alone. An entrepreneur’s decision making might be improved, however, if perceptions of the enterprise’s situation held by the family and other stakeholders were to be taken into consideration at an early stage of a crisis process. This paper presents, as a proposal, a process model and a management tool, based on quantitative and qualitative data, to evaluate the perceptions of the different stakeholders of an enterprise of how to prevent the emergence of a crisis.