Factors Associated with Propensity for Sustainable Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship has both positive and negative contributions to our society. On the negative side, the degradation of environmental quality caused by entrepreneurial activities requires serious attention. As such, sustainable entrepreneurship has been suggested as an attempt to alleviate environmental problems. However, embarkation of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) on environmental management is still not promising. Furthermore, there are scant studies in regard to motivation and propensity in the development of sustainable entrepreneurs among SMEs practitioners. Thus, this study was conducted to address the factors associated with propensity for sustainable entrepreneurship among owners-managers of SMEs. A total of 249 SMEs were randomly selected as the sample of this study and surveyed through self-administered questionnaires. Based on the descriptive analyses, this paper found that owners-managers of SMEs generally possessed positive or favorable attitude towards sustainability, concerned about social pressures on sustainability, perceived that sustainable entrepreneurship was attractive and perceived themselves as having sufficient ability for sustainable entrepreneurship. Furthermore, they also exhibited high level of propensity for becoming sustainable entrepreneurs. The correlation analysis revealed that all the hypotheses were supported. Specifically, sustainability attitude, social norm, perceived desirability and perceived feasibility recorded positive association with propensity for sustainable entrepreneurship. However, perceived feasibility recorded a stronger strength of association than sustainability attitude, social norm and perceived desirability. This paper also suggested that future researchers should employ different types of analyses and could attempt to investigate the actual sustainable entrepreneurial behavior among SMEs. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.