Given the rapid inflow of African immigrant entrepreneurs into South Africa, as well as the lack of understanding and research attention given to African immigrant entrepreneurial orientation, the failure rate of their businesses in South Africa is very high. The purpose of this study is to contribute to more effective and robust African immigrant entrepreneurship in South Africa by investigating the impact of African immigrant entrepreneurial orientation on business performance. With this purpose in mind, the primary objective of this study is to establish the level of entrepreneurial orientation of African immigrant-owned small businesses in the Eastern Cape Province, and to determine the influence of this orientation on business performance. This study sets out to pull together previous findings and theories on the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation, and business performance, to find support for the theories on the determinants of entrepreneurial orientation in the literature, and to combine these findings into a simple model. An overview of small businesses was first conducted, in which the nature of small businesses and African immigrant-owned small businesses was taken into consideration, as well as the role small businesses play within the economy and the different challenges small businesses face. The dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation were discussed. These included Innovativeness, Pro-activeness, Risk-taking, Competitive aggressiveness, and Autonomy. Business performance was discussed and was measured in terms of financial and non-financial measures. The resource based view was also discussed and human, social, and financial capitals were taken into consideration. A proposed theoretical framework was established to show the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and business performance of African immigrant-owned small businesses and this was later tested by developing a hypothesis. A structured questionnaire was developed and data was collected through these self-administered questionnaires. They were made available to the respondents by a means of the snowball technique and data was collected from 218 respondents. Each construct was defined and operationalised. This was done by using themes from previous studies, as well as self developed themes. Cronbach‟s alpha coefficients were used to confirm reliability and validity of the measuring instruments. Completed questionnaires were subject to different statistical tests. A descriptive analysis was carried out, as well as an exploratory factor analysis, multiple regression and an analysis of variance. The findings of this study showed that Innovativeness has a negative relationship to Business performance whilst Competitive aggressiveness, Proactiveness, Risk-taking, and Autonomy have a significant positive relationship to Business performance. Furthermore, the findings established that Financial capital has a significant relationship to Competitive aggressiveness, Innovativeness, and Proactiveness, whilst there is no relationship to Risk-taking and Autonomy. In addition, it was established that there is a significant relationship between Human capital and Competitive aggressiveness, Proactiveness, and Autonomy, whilst there is no relationship to Innovativeness and Risk-taking. Moreover, the study also showed that a relationship exists between some selected demographic variables of the African immigrant-owned small business and entrepreneurial orientation, as measured by Innovativeness (H1a), Pro-activeness (H1b), Risk-taking (H1c), Competitive aggressiveness (H1d) and Autonomy (H1e). An exception was the demographic variable, the Level of education, which was not found to be as stipulated in the hypothesis. In the context of this study, it was found that 62% of change in African immigrant-owned small business performance is affected by entrepreneurial orientation while other factors accounted for the remaining 38%. Management should revisit its entrepreneurial orientation capabilities and determine whether these are delivering values. This will require a review of policies and procedures in addition to benchmarking these activities to identify whether the business is committing an unwarranted and misplaced amount of resources to a given entrepreneurial orientation activity. Blind pursuit of the uniform implementation of an entrepreneurial dimension is not an effective way for African immigrant-owned small businesses to create an advantage.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:nmmu/vital:27315 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Akah Ndang, William |
| Publisher | Nelson Mandela University, Faculty of Business and Economic Sciences |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Masters, MCom |
| Format | xvi, 227 leaves, pdf |
| Rights | Nelson Mandela University |
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