Human Resource Issues Among SMES in Eastern Europe: A 30 Month Study in Belarus, Poland, And Ukraine (Manuscripts‪)‬

ABSTRACT In the present study we examine the applicability of some traditional human resource management theories to 374 owners of small to medium sized enterprises in border cities of Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine. We examine the relationships between facets of job satisfaction and annual income, and between facets of job satisfaction and performance. It is found that performance and annual incomes were relatively unrelated to facets of job satisfaction with multiple R's in the range of .05 to .34. We also found that within the time period studied that 17.4% of the owners left their businesses for greener pastures. We conclude that many findings based in traditional Western human resource management about the relationships between performance, income, and job satisfaction designed for use with employees do not seem to operate well with business owners in Eastern Europe.