The relationship between entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation, learning orientation, technology orientation and SMEs performance in Nigeria

摘要

In spite of the recognized significant contribution of SMEs to the nations’ economy, Nigerian SMEs performance is below expectation. Their low contribution to GDP and employment shows this gross under performance.Moreover, the SMEs high failure rate is another indication of their low performance.Hence, past literature's suggest that strategic orientations have a significant effect on firm performance, even though most of the studies concentrated on investigating one or two strategic orientation at a time.Research on the combination of these important strategic orientations in a single model is scarce, and there is paucity about the best orientations to be adopted.The objective of this study is to investigate the positive influence of entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation, learning orientation, and technology orientation on SMEs performance in Nigeria.A cross-sectional study of questionnaire survey research design was conducted and data was generated from 362udusable questionnaires of owner-managers of small firms.To conduct the analysis, the study applies PLS-SEM to understand the positive effects of entrepreneurial, market, learning and technology orientations on the performance of SMEs in Nigeria.The results indicate that entrepreneurial, learning and technology orientations have positive affect on performance, however, in thisudcontext, the result do not support the view that market orientation positively affect firm performance.Essentially, the findings suggest that SMEs need to combine their entrepreneurial ability with learning from their environment and adopting new technology trends in the markets.