Impact of lifestyle oriented-motivation and corporate social responsibility on multiadventure sports firms′ performance

The number of sports firms has grown in recent years, along with the emergence in this sector of so-called lifestyle entrepreneurs. However, although some research has been done to analyse and understand this type of entrepreneur in the sports sector, relatively little is known about them or the factors that affect the performance (objective and subjective) and the continuity of their firms (intention to operate the firm for a long time). Therefore, the objectives of the current study are to discover what combinations of corporate social responsibility behaviours and lifestyle-oriented motivations generate high and low levels of objective and subjective performance for these sports lifestyle entrepreneurs and to analyse whether objective and subjective performance are related to their intention to operate their firm for a long time. To this end, a questionnaire was administered to different owners of multi-adventure sport firms at both the national and international levels. Then, a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) methodology was used to analyse the data. The results show that the combinations of conditions required to reach objective and subjective performance are different and that lifestyle-oriented motivation is of particular importance for subjective performance. Moreover, only subjective performance was related to the intention to operate the firm for a long time. Thus, these results help to better understand the lifestyle entrepreneurs in the sports sector by clarifying which factors influence the performance of these types of firms. Finally, some theoretical and practical implications are presented for policy makers in the sports sector.