Muslim Women Entrepreneurs Motivation in SMEs: A Quantitative Study in Asia Pacific Countries

Abstract

Contribution/ OriginalityThis paper primary contribution in finding the motivation of Muslim women entrepreneurs in Asian Pacific SMEs and proposes some solutions in elevating their position as businesswomen.

Perceptions to Start up Business as a Career Choice among Saudi Female Higher Education Students

“…The findings also revealed that the students with entrepreneurial/business experience expressed a higher intention to start own business. This result is consistent with the findings of earlier studies which reported that students with previous business experience have a significant and positive influence on their ambition to pursue an entrepreneurial career [19,20,32,95]. This is an expected finding given that business experiences or activities provide students with an opportunity to promote the kind of creative thinking and idea generation central to innovation and new venture development, to acquire certain business skills, confidence and vision, all of which contribute to inclination to start a new business.…”

“…The logistic regression analyses with the inclusion of all factors as well as correlation analysis between perceptions of career choice and four motives showed that having higher aspiration of acquiring social status, contributing to the national economy, gaining more money/wealth enjoying risk and challenges might be helpful in starting a new business made significant contributions on entrepreneurial intent for Saudi students. This affirms previous studies in finding that females who have higher motivation are more likely to engage in entrepreneurial activities [18,19,[32][33][34][35][36]. Saudi female students perceived themselves as risk and challenge takers and ready to contribute to the national economy.…”

“…Literature shows that entrepreneurs are driven by several goals which have been widely investigated with regard to their influence on business start-ups. Most studies have identified that the main goal factors motivating women's aspirations to start a business are the desire for money/wealth, social status and power/being own boss, enjoy challenge and risk, and to contribute to the national economy [18,[32][33][34][35][36]. For example, Azmi [32] noted that the desire to be own boss (social status/power) was an important goal factor of female university students in Ethiopia for starting a business.…”

Factors Affecting Women Entrepreneurs’ Success; A study of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Emerging Market of Pakistan

“…Results of the current study reveal that internal factors including self-con dence, risk aversion and need for achievement, and external factors including economic and socio-cultural factors have a positive and signi cant impact on women entrepreneurs' success in Pakistan. So, our ndings support the previous studies results in both of developed and developing economies such as (Azmi, 2017;Rani and Hashim 2017;Muhammad, McElwee, and Dana, 2017) suggested that women entrepreneurs internal behavior self-con dence and motivational force enhance the competitive advantage, these capabilities help them to become a successful women entrepreneur. On the other hand, some other researchers (Muhammad, McElwee, and Dana, 2017;Hasan and Almubarak, 2016) have shown that external factors also in uence women entrepreneurs' success, While, our study is different from developed economies nding because they (Bastian, Sidani, & El Amine, 2018;Laudano, et al, 2018) suggested that these factors cannot signi cantly enhance women entrepreneurs' success.…”

“…This research is an attempt to discover factors in uencing the performance of women entrepreneurs in this context. Therefore, past studies scrutinized that family support, self-con dence and motivation (Azmi, 2017), risktaking and motivation (Rani and Hashim 2017), lack of business skills (Muhammad, McElwee, and Dana, 2017) plays a very important role in women employee performance. While, government policies, access to nance, culture and regulation (Muhammad, McElwee, and Dana, 2017) signi cantly affect women-run enterprises' success.…”