Differences in innovativeness, proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness in relation to entrepreneurial motives

Abstract

Motivation of entrepreneurs must be appropriate to the level of risk they are facing in their businesses. Some entrepreneurs can perceive profit or financial motivation as a subsidiary motive and can start their own business with non-financial motives, e.g., apprehending business as a mission. The aim of this article is to identify the relationship between entrepreneurial motives and the selected constructs of entrepreneurial orientation (innovativeness, proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness) on the case study of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Czech Republic. We have analyzed the data collected in 2015 from 1141 SMEs in 14 regions of Czech Republic. For the purposes of this article we focused on the motives for doing business, which were analyzed for the sample as a whole and also for two selected groups of the respondents. The first group (330 respondents) consisted of entrepreneurs who featured money as the most important motive for starting up a business, while the second group (251 respondents) consisted of those entrepreneurs who featured their life mission as the main reason for starting a business. The main results of our paper confirm the existence of statistically significant differences in innovativeness, proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness between the entrepreneurs motivated by money and those motivated by mission. Regardless the entrepreneurial motives the vast majority of the surveyed entrepreneurs consider innovativeness and proactiveness to be important for their companies. On the other hand, most of them do not realize aggressive activities against the competition they are facing. © Foundation of International Studies, 2017 and CSR, 2017.