Financial Literacy of Owner Manager and Firm Performance of SME’s: Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Financial literacy of Owner Manager has been identified as a one of the key competencies required for the establishing, management and thriving SMEs. However, the exact effect they have on the performance of SMEs has not been fully established by the available literature. This paper aims to present a systematic review of literature related to Financial Literacy of Owner Manager and Firm Performances of SMEs. A systematic literature review (SLR) method was used to analyze relevant articles from Emerald Insight and Google Scholar published during the period from 2010 to 2018. After the scrutiny, only 37 articles were finally selected for the systematic literature review according to the criteria established. In the study, the state of art of literature, content analysis and gaps in literature were identified. The findings have shown a growing interest in researching and publishing on this subject. Through the review on the available literature, it was revealed that the generally accepted relationship between financial literacy of Owner Manager and firm performance has not been found resulting in future research requirements. Furthermore, the review has identified the individual level of analysis and the deductive perspective as a common trend. There is a shortage in theory-building and qualitative studies in this field of knowledge. On the basis of the review, several gaps in the literature are identified that need to be filled in future research.