Leadership Styles and Small Enterprises’ Performance: Is Gender an Issue? Empirical Study from Democratic Republic of Congo

In this paper, we provide new empirical evidence to the relationships between leadership styles (LS) and organizational performance, introducing gender as moderator variable. Data have been collected in two Congolese towns (Bukavu and Goma); an African post-conflict region dominated by very small family businesses that have not received enough attention. Combining exploratory factor analysis with a multivariate regression we found three main results. First, both leadership and performance are confirmed to be multidimensional. LS comprised participative/democratic leadership, and autocratic/directive leadership, while performance has three dimensions: employee efficiency/productivity, effectiveness, and customer satisfaction/retention. Second, the autocratic leadership is the more adopted both by men and women, with a slight non-significant difference for men. Although democratic leadership is underscored, it appears to be more adopted by women with significant difference. Third, controlling for other variables, only participative/democratic leadership styles have positive impact on SMEs’ performance, while autocratic leadership does not influence it. This implies that, in the growing competition facing SMEs, managers should adopt leadership style that allows their employees to internalize the firm’s objectives and to be committed. Also, our research confirms that women have much to give in managing enterprises, as they appear to be stronger in leadership styles, which have more impact on main dimensions of firms’ performance. Moreover, our results suggest new avenues for deeper research about leadership styles in family-owned enterprises.

Two-sided Institutional Impacts and Informal Entrepreneurship Motivation in Nigeria

Institutions are developed to direct individuals’ behaviours in ways that lead to their fulfilment. However, either by deliberate human design or other factors, institutions can also either impact positively or negatively on individuals with entrepreneurial ambition. This characterisation is typical of Nigeria’s institutions because of their often two-sided impacts on the individual. This article uses interview data from a qualitative study to demonstrate how ambiguity, as reflected in the often conflicting effects of institutional arrangements in Nigeria influence the decision to engage in informal entrepreneurship. In particular, the finding that both the enforcement and the absence of enforcement of formal laws potentially cause informality, presents a challenge that seriously implicate policy formulation and point to the need for more targeted research.

Sustainability Issues of Women Street Vegetable & Flower Entrepreneurs in Goa: Need for State Interventions

In the wave of globalisation and the neo-classical economic doctrine of ‘market expansion and state compression’, the footprints of women street entrepreneurs are fast disappearing from our economy. The women street entrepreneurship provided a wonderful opportunity for inclusive growth narratives in rural areas among the economically and socially challenged sections. The advent liberalisation–privatisation–globalisation (LPG) process robbed even the public space available to the women street entrepreneurs in Goa 1 especially, the women and their death-knell became louder and clearer with every passing day.

Business Incubation Centres in Universities and Their Role in Developing Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Given the potential of start-ups in wealth creation in an economy, universities can play a leading role in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Our article focuses on the need to provide a strong impetus for establishing business incubation centres at universities for progressive creation of innovation start-ups. The study reviews the current status of business incubators affiliated with universities in India. It also explores the variables such as location, affiliation and ease of doing business which help facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship. An ontological perspective of objectivism whereby universities are seen to play a role in not just generation of knowledge but also in the development of an ecosystem where the knowledge is transferred to initiate new ventures is considered for the study. Based on the entire population of universities in India; 937 universities were considered for the study through the websites, and an analysis of the coherent and incoherent activities of these incubation centres was performed to check for the presence of entrepreneurship-related activities. Also, the ease of doing business rankings were mapped to assess whether they played a role in stimulating the setup of incubators.

Tendencies of the Absorptive Capacity and Its Correlation with Innovation and the Incubated Companies’ Performance

This study aims at mapping the scientific production of absorptive capacity (ACAP) and identifying how these studies analyse the correlation of ACAP with company innovation and with organisational performance. For such, a bibliometric study was carried out, and it used criteria that selected the main articles that have been published on absorptive capacity in two research bases—ISI Web of Science and Scopus—within a temporal cut from the past 5 years (2014–2018). With the help of the HistCiteTM and VOSviewer software, it was possible to select the articles that addressed the correlation of absorptive capacity with company innovation and organisational performance in the incubated companies’ context. By analysing these articles’ findings, it can be concluded that the absorptive capacity is an antecedent of innovation in companies and has a positive correlation with organisational performance. The studies’ tendencies show that the factors which help with the external knowledge intake are social networks, bonds with agents and partner proximity. However, the incubated companies need the incubators’ support to help with these factors, since they are novice companies and do not keep in touch with important partners. They also need to know how to explore and transform external knowledge into internal benefits.

Steering Sustainable Economic Growth: Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Approach

The importance of entrepreneurship in steering sustained economic growth and improved well-being has been re-echoed over the past decade. Regrettably, the sub-Saharan Africa setting lags behind from the point of harnessing the economic development impact of entrepreneurship, and the obvious implication is ever increasing unemployment and poverty. Utilising a systematic review approach, this article draws from the body of knowledge to shed light on critical strategies towards achieving productive entrepreneurship. Specifically, we forward an entrepreneurial ecosystem framework that underlines the importance of institutional level and enterprise level attributes in achieving effective entrepreneurial ecosystem and maximising economic growth gains. We highlight strategic and pro-active initiatives for ensuring active and ambitious entrepreneurial orientation that will contribute to economic growth and create employment. Towards achieving these targets, we also flag critical policy guides, drawing attention to the facilitating role that governments can play in ensuring an effective and economic growth impacting entrepreneurial ecosystem. Directions for future research have been flag.

A Factor Analysis of the Entrepreneurial Success, Motivation andProblems Faced: The Case of Chinese Entrepreneurs

We examined the following factors in this study of Chinese entrepreneurs’ success: entrepreneurial motivation, success factors, start-up challenges, business growth, the role of family and social network in reducing stress, and professional satisfaction. In this study, we examined Chinese entrepreneurs for their motivations to start a business, factors that support their success, problems that occur during start-up and growth of the business, the role of family and social network in creating a less stressful working environment, and the overall level of satisfaction with their profession. Results indicate that economic worries were the most important reason for starting one’s own business than career and personal motives. Chinese small and medium-sized enterprise(SME) owners cited honesty and customer relations as the other most important factors in their success. Additionally, Chinese entrepreneurs rated employee-related problems as the most critical problem among all problems we asked in the survey. Results also showed that the gender of the entrepreneurs we sampled was not a significant differentiating factor in identifying entrepreneurial motivations.

What Determines the Geography of Entrepreneurship? A Comparative Study Between Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia

There is a clear disparity between different regions of the world regarding the type and number of entrepreneurs. These differences are most prominent between low-income regions like Africa and middle- to high-income regions such as South-East Asia. Thirty years ago, Asian and African countries were at similar stages of development, but today their difference in entrepreneurship and economic development is massive, which makes them intriguing cases to compare. To investigate the extent of this and explain why it happens, this study identifies the main influences on entrepreneurial activity, according to entrepreneurship ecosystem (EE) theory and knowledge spillover theory. Making use of multivariate analysis of variance, the most prominent factors responsible for the difference in entrepreneurship capacity in the regions were found to be technology development, political situation and the quality of public institutions. South-East Asia provides these to a sufficient degree thereby giving rise to a healthy EE, while Africa’s ability to build this infrastructure is still in its embryonic stage. This study’s efficacy is to inform on possible policies that low- and middle-income nations can follow to build entrepreneurship in their current economic situations, as well as to expand EE theory in the underexplored context of developing countries.

Measuring Entrepreneurial Self-efficacy: A Comprehensive Scale

With the increasing popularity of entrepreneurship education programs across the world, the impact assessment of such programs has gathered considerable interest of the researchers. Growing number of studies are including entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) as a key predictor of future entrepreneurial behaviour and hence the scale for measuring ESE is central to majority of studies pertaining to entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial behaviour. This study attempts to refine the existing instruments for measuring ESE by extensively reviewing the notable scales of ESE in literature and develops a comprehensive scale of ESE relevant in the Indian context. The additional components are added to the existing scales through expert discussions with the academicians as well as entrepreneurs. The scale is further verified for its reliability and validity by using appropriate statistical methods.