Employment plays an important role in maintaining economic virtuous circle. If employment is deteriorated, social and economic conflicts are intensified to slow down economic growth, which in turn makes employment situations unstable in the market. So, in order to achieve continuous economic growth, it is necessary to absorb underutilized labor force into the industry and stabilize corporate circumstances.
In these roles, the role of small-scale enterprises including small and medium-sized enterprises, small enterprises, and small businesses is very important as they are not brilliant but continue to operate without a break even now. As of 2016, the number of small and medium-sized enterprises is 3,542,000, which account for over 90% of overall domestic workplaces or operations, while the employees of those enterprises are also 14,020,000 persons, which account for 51% of economically active population in total (27,418,000 persons) on the basis of the index in the Ministry of Employment and Labor in 2016. Literally, small and medium-sized enterprises or small enterprises can be regarded as th pilar to support the society.
However, because these small and medium-scale enterprises are insufficient in their financial structure, manpower structure, and information technology unlike large enterprises, their competencies to cope with the change in external environment are very vulnerable. Furthermore, as personal start-ups go bankrupt in 3.4 years and corporate start-ups go bankrupt in about 4-5 years, these bankruptcies and start-ups are repeated so that their potentials and competences can not grow.
In these situations, since the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and other local governments provide government support projects to small and medium-sized enterprises, small enterprises, or small businesses, these projects arouse great expectations. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore the current status and improvements of these government support projects, and so help small and medium-scale enterprises to realize their potentials through the internal reinforcement of policies.
The concrete purpose of this study is to analyze beneficiary satisfaction with government support policies or education and training systems as well as their perceived effects through performance measurement. For this purpose, this study conducted judgment sampling over the subjects of nationwide small enterprises from September 19 until October 2 in cooperation with professional survey company E company.
For its analysis methods, through AMOS program, this study used confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model including mediating effect test as well as performed multi-group analysis on the basis of the prediction that perceived aspects can differ according to benefit frequency.
The results of this study can be summarized as follows.
First, in the financial and non-financial dimensions, if the government directly provided policy supports, workplaces perceived no significant performance improvement. However, workplaces perceived satisfaction with support policies themselves.
Second, if workers perceived the transfer of education and training received in advance, workplaces perceived significant performance improvement and support policy satisfaction.
Third, in the mediating path whether satisfaction with support policies was mediated to perceived performance improvement if workplace perceived satisfaction with support policies, policy support had complete mediating effects, whereas education and training had incomplete mediating effects.
Fourth, there were prominent and conspicuous group differences between perceived education and training levels and support policy satisfaction according to benefit frequency.
In conclusion, workplaces less than small enterprises perceived satisfaction with performance and government support policies if manpower had sufficient qualitative levels fostered through education and training system rather than direct supports including financial supports. In addition, such workplaces relied on well-trained manpower if the workplaces benefited from government supports initially, whereas such workplaces increasingly relied on direct government policy supports if the workplaces continued to benefit from government supports several times.
These results show that it is very urgent to demand and supply the manpower educated and trained well in small enterprises and small-scale workplaces and so the government’s policies and systems should focus on this urgent problem in the future.