earticle

영어

Development of tourism destinations is a critical driver of regional and national economic growth. The performance of micro-firms in tourism destinations is deeply associated with service quality perceived by tourists, strongly influencing the competitiveness of tourism destination and promoting tourist loyalty to the destination. To understand the performance of micro-firms, exiting literature in tourism and hospitality has adopted various business and management perspectives, such as personal characteristics of managers, organizational resources and capabilities, and business environment. Despite the theoretical diversity, the previous studies have relied heavily on theories in business and management studies. To overcome the limitation, this study adopts sociological perspective to predict the performance of micro-firms in tourism destination. This study proposes a structural equation model in which micro-firms’ social capital has a positive effect on performance and the managers’ self-efficacy mediates the relationship between social capital and performance. For an empirical analysis, this study performed a survey of 205 micro-firms in Jeongseon-gun, Gangwon-do Province in South Korea and carried out hypothesis tests. The analysis results found that the social capital has a positive and significant impact on the performance. Furthermore, this research shows that the self-efficacy of managers has a full mediation effect on the relationship, suggesting that the managers’ self-efficacy is the critical path that connects micro-firms’ social capital and performance.