A Qualitative Study on Individual Factors Affecting Iranian Women Entrepreneurs’ Growth Orientation

Abstract

Despite the impressive growth in the number of firms run by women entrepreneurs, most of these businesses continue to remain small and women-owned firms have not grown as fast as male entrepreneurs. There are many reasons that may help explain the growth limitations in women-owned firms. Amongall, growth orientation is an important factor. A common finding in entrepreneurship literature shows that ventures owned by women tend to be smaller than those by men are. This difference can be due toindividual, organizational and environmental factors.Since half of Iran's population iswomen who are more willing to have higher education and contribution in the society, they deal with more challenges rather than their male counterparts. So attention to the factors affecting growth orientation of their ventures is the same as deliberate economic development and nationalincome. This is a qualitative study to identify individual factors affecting growth orientation in women's businesses. Data analysis of 11 semi-structured interviews on a sample of women entrepreneurs indicated individual factors in four groups of "goals and aspirations", "motives", "female identity" and "personal characteristics".

Factors influencing women entrepreneurs’ performance in SMEs

“…Pirolo and Prsutti (2010) approved the positive relationship between different kinds of social capital in an organization on its economic performance during all phases of constructing the business. Additionally, in the study of Iranian women entrepreneur's growth orientation conducted by Arasti et al (2012), it considers the effect of social connection, cultural norms and values are highly influence women entrepreneurs' growth orientation.…”

“…According to this study, there are eight independent factors affecting the performance of women entrepreneurs in small and medium enterprises which are entrepreneurial orientation, entrepreneur goals and motives, human capital, industry (SMEs) characteristics, economies, socio-cultural, legal and administrative factors and opportunity recognition. There are several studies that have been conducted about entrepreneurship performance model with different variables (Ekype et al, 2010;Teoh and Chong, 2007;Arasti et al, 2012, Hossain et al, 2009. For this study, we develop a model that aims to describe factors affecting women entrepreneurs' performance and challenges that they may face when conducting their businesses as it is shown in Figure (1).…”

“…Socio-Cultural Factors involves a combination of social and cultural factors that affect women entrepreneurs' performance. Arasti et al (2012) argues that the key role of social relationship is apparent in affecting prosperity of the organization. It enables entrepreneur to identify opportunities, information and resources.…”

Imperatives for improving entrepreneurial behavior among females in the UAE

“…Socio-demographic variables have an impact on the usage of advice-seeking networks by female entrepreneurs in the Arab region as female entrepreneurs tend to rely more on personal networks as compared to male entrepreneurs (Huang et al, 2013). In addition, they exploit their social network as channels that enable them to identify opportunities, access information, customers, suppliers and financial resources (Arasti et al, 2012). The availability and connectivity to formal and informal professional linkages is vital to business development and growth (Rosenbusch et al, 2010).…”

“…In addition, they exploit their social network as channels that enable them to identify opportunities, access information, customers, suppliers and financial resources (Arasti et al, 2012). The availability and connectivity to formal and informal professional linkages is vital to business development and growth (Rosenbusch et al, 2010).…”