Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore the leaders to identify the leadership obstacles. For such purposes, the phenomenological method of Giorgi (2004) was applied to explore leadership experiences of 27 SMEs’ leaders. The results are as follows. The leadership obstacles are “situation where leadership is different”, “overwhelmed by team management and training responsiblity”, “recognize the lack of the leader-self”, “inconveniene caused by the age and gender of team members”, “a critical and personal attitude of team member”, “problems in team cohesion”, “unsupportive attitude of boss”, “conflict between relevant teams”, “discontent over company”, and “state economy and market situation”, totaling to 10 components, 25 subcomponents, and 112 conceptualized semantic units. Finally, the meaning of results and implications were discussed.