TITLE:
Entrepreneurial Orientations and Business Financial Performance: The Case of Micro Businesses in Tanzania
AUTHORS:
Riziki M. Nyello, Nuru Kalufya
KEYWORDS:
Entrepreneurial Orientations, Business Financial Performance and Micro Businesses
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Business and Management,
Vol.9 No.3,
May
28,
2021
ABSTRACT: Micro
business in Africa including Tanzania does not perform well financially due to various
business environmental challenges. In this line, entrepreneurial orientations
are said to improve micro business financial performance regardless of
unfavourable business environment. Despite such importance of entrepreneurial
orientations, there was scanty knowledge on the influence of proactive and risk
taking behaviour on business sales and costs. Focusing from the Contingency
perspective, this article aimed at filling in such knowledge gap. Most studies
examined the influence of entrepreneurial orientations on firm performance from
the resource-based perspective. However, the influence of entrepreneurial
orientations on firm performance depends on the match between entrepreneurial
orientations and firm performance goals. The article involved 388 micro
businesses from Dar-es-salaam, Mbeya, Morogoro, and Manyara. The questionnaire
was used to collect data while Mean and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) were
used as data analysis techniques. The results revealed that proactive behavior
had significantly positive influence on business sales and significantly negative influence on
business costs. Furthermore, the risk-taking behaviour was found to have significantly positive influence on
business costs. Among others, the article recommends that the micro business
owners/operators should strengthen their entrepreneurial capacity together with
their employees. It will be achieved by establishing sectoral associations in
accordance with their business categories, i.e., trade, services and manufacturing in order to organize and access
professional entrepreneurial trainings.