Impact of Social Entrepreneurial Factors on Sustainable Enterprise Development: Mediating Role of Social Network and Moderating Effect of Government Regulations

Can social enterprises aid sustainable development? Evidence from multi-stage investigations

BACKGROUND

Social enterprises must balance between profitability and sustainability. The impetus on sustainability grew further after the adaption of the SDG agenda by the United Nations (UN).

OBJECTIVE

This paper examines the role of social enterprises in helping attain sustainable development goals in India.

RESEARCH DESIGN

This multi-stage paper comprises three studies directed at scale development, scale refinement, pre-testing, and construct validity. The scale development stage is conducted through a combination of extensive literature review and focused group discussions. Expert discussions and item-reduction techniques have been used in the second stage aimed at scale refinement and pre-testing. The third stage of testing construct validity is carried out through Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM).

RESULTS

The findings suggest that all the competencies of social enterprises identified in the study i.e. social mission, collaborative networks, innovation, financial viability and level of scalability significantly impact sustainable development.

CONCLUSION

Because the goals of social enterprises and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are mutually reinforcing and complementary, the study suggests that social enterprises have a lot of potential for achieving the SDGs. The study also suggests future research directions and policy implications that can be replicated in other countries.

Does congruence between a descendant entrepreneur's personality traits and family business values matter for succession?

Purpose

In this paper, we investigate two research queries pertaining to the success of small family business succession. First, we examine how the Big-5 personality traits of descendant entrepreneurs influence the success of their family business succession. Second, we investigate whether descendant entrepreneurs whose personality traits are congruent with the values of their family business, would lead to the success of their family business succession, through the mediating role of descendant entrepreneur-family business value congruence (DE-FBVC).

Methodology

We rely on the person-organization fit theory for our conceptual framework and we collected primary data from 124 respondents designated as chairman and managing directors in small family businesses.

Results

Our results show that a descendant entrepreneur's openness, extroversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness traits are likely to lead to successful family business succession, but a descendant entrepreneur with neuroticism trait is unlikely to do so. In addition, our results reveal that the DE-FBVC mediates the relationship between openness and extroversion traits with succession success positively, but between neuroticism trait and succession success negatively. By contrast, we find that DE-FBVC does not mediate the relationship between conscientiousness and agreeableness traits with succession success.

Originality

The findings of our study suggest that while four of the Big-5 personality traits matter for the success of small family business succession, specific personality traits of descendant entrepreneurs which are found to be congruent with the values of their family business, will also lead to succession success.

Factors influencing women's entrepreneurial success: A multi-analytical approach

Women entrepreneurs are significant contributors to the economic development of any country and their role becomes more vital in improving the economic condition of developing countries. This highlights the important role of women-owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and their entrepreneurial success. Therefore, the current study extends the entrepreneurship literature by examining the effects of factors like personality traits (PT), motivation and commitment (MC), availability of financial resources (AFR), and government support (GS) on entrepreneurial success (ES) of women-owned SMEs. Using a purposive sampling technique data from 255 women-owned SMEs were collected. A multi-analytical approach was employed to analyze the data. The Structural equation modeling (SEM) results indicated that PT, MC, AFR, and GS have a direct effect of ES whereas MC also mediated the link between PT and ES, and the results reveal that in presence of MC the effects of PT on ES become more significant. SEM results revealed that PT and AFR are the most important factors related to entrepreneurial success. On the contrary, ANN analysis revealed that "motivation and commitment" is the most influencing factor. These findings can guide business practitioners and policymakers in the envisioned strategy formulation to encourage women entrepreneurs who can contribute to their country's sustainable economic growth.

Identifying the factors affecting strategic decision-making ability to boost the entrepreneurial performance: A hybrid structural equation modeling – artificial neural network approach

This study builds a conceptual model of strategic decision-making ability that leads to entrepreneurial performance (EP) based on the two-system decision-making theory and logical analysis. An empirical approach using structural equation modeling – artificial neural network (SEM-ANN) was performed to describe the linear and nonlinear relationships in the proposed model. The empirical results reveal that strategic decision-making abilities are affected by five factors: attention, memory, thinking, emotion, and sentiment, and whose influence mechanisms and degrees are varied. Results also describe that these abilities have a positive effect on overall EP. Therefore, results suggest that businesses’ strategic decision-making is usually strengthened when entrepreneurs have a clear understanding of these influencing elements, and the interaction between them leads to improved performance.

Untying Moral Efficacy and Meaningfulness in Promoting Students' Social Entrepreneurial Intentions: The Mediating Role of Positive Reciprocity

This study chooses to describe social entrepreneurship as a social mission that enables business students to identify opportunities to launch start-ups and social enterprises by understanding the nature of social responsibility and fostering a reciprocal attitude to solve social issues. We collected data on students from different business schools in mainland China through a structured questionnaire (n = 326) and analyzed them through structural equation modeling (SEM). The results show that moral efficacy and meaningfulness are positively related to positive reciprocity, which leads to students' social entrepreneurial intentions. The study concluded that potential social entrepreneurs should take ethical courses as part of their training to help them develop a responsible mentality and social entrepreneurial aspirations. On this basis, the practical and theoretical significance of this study is proposed, and its limitations and future development directions are pointed out.