Factors of Sustainable Firm Performance and the Mediating Role of Strategic Opportunity Recognition: A Conceptual Study

Abstract

The significant role of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in economic development has been acknowledged and focused for a very long time. They dominate the business establishment around the world. The current challenging and volatile business landscape has called for greater scrutiny to identify survival toolkit for SMEs, given that SMEs are very much important to the dramatic economic changes. Thus, understanding practices that may damage business success is needed urgently. With this crucial and critical situation, it is the time now to identify an alternative approach to understand practices that lead to business success. The purpose of this study is to concentrate on the influence of strategic entrepreneurship (SE) which is manifested in exploration activities only that in-turn represented by strategic opportunity recognition construct, on sustainable SMEs performance in Malaysia. This paper is an attempt to address this challenge by developing a framework for the assessment of recognizing the important role of SE in efficiently contributing to the achievement of Sustainable Firm Performance. Contribution/ Originality: This study contributes in the existing literature on organizational sustainability performance which was found to be limited, particularly by focusing on SMEs in context of Malaysia. It is hoped that this article will instigate research ideas among scholars paving way towards empirical examining of SMEs' sustainable performance and its drivers.

Artistic Orientation, Financial Literacy, Digital Literacy, and MSME Performance

“…Financial literacy consists of two dimensions, knowledge and application (Atkinson & Messy, 2012;Hung et al, 2011;Huston, 2010). Financial literacy is considered one of the success factors and a source of competitive advantage for MSME (Abad-Segura & González-Zamar, 2019;Anwar et al, 2020;Asante & Affum-Osei, 2019;Buchdadi et al, 2020;Eniola & Entebang, 2015;Mabula & Ping, 2018;Teh et al, 2018), improve performance and profitability (Fatoki, 2014;Hussain et al, 2018;Kulathunga et al, 2020;Wise, 2013) because it allows managers to know their financial position beneficial (Purnomo, 2019), although there are insignificant research results (Bruhn & Zia, 2013b) (Eresia-Eke & Raath, 2013. Financial literacy is essential to avoid poor financial management (Purnomo, 2019) and improve performance in the creative industry (Purnomo, 2020).…”

Determinants that attract and discourage foreign direct investment in GCC countries: Do macroeconomic and environmental factors matter?

“…Numerous studies have explored the determinants of FDI using various methodologies, factors, samples, and timeframes [5][6][7][8][9][10]. Most of these studies have focused on factors commonly recognized by existing theories, particularly policy indicators, business-related aspects, market-related factors, resource-driven factors, and drivers of economic productivity [9].…”