Décrypter la stratégie de la TPE grâce à l’analyse de l’identité professionnelle de son propriétaire-dirigeant

The owner-director of a VSB is a central element of the performance and development of their organization. Literature considers that their strategic behavior will depend on their character traits. In its analysis, this work does not attach an important place to the professional aspect. To this purpose and so as to understand their strategic behavior our research offers to study the construction of the professional identity of the Director. In order to deal with this issue the object of our study is the pharmacist. They move in a branch of industry where the competitive process is more and more important. The successive developments of the behaviour of the customer, competition and authorities bring about a lot of uncertainties on the future of their profession. In other respects their originality lies in having a hybrid status as they are both a health professional and tradesperson. This makes their identity placement on the market more difficult. Seventeen owner-directors of chemist?s shops were examined in the framework of a qualitative exploratory analysis. The results show that the professional identity has an impact on the strategic behaviour of the director. For that purpose, three strategic orientations are identified according to an identity mark turning on both health and trade.