Entrepreneurial orientation and Palestinian family-owned businesses: does governance or geographic location make a difference?
Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development
ISSN: 1462-6004
Article publication date: 20 February 2024
Issue publication date: 28 March 2024
Abstract
Purpose
This article explores the effect of entrepreneurial orientation (EO), governance and geographic location on the performance of Palestinian family-owned businesses.
Design/methodology/approach
This quantitative study uses data collected in the fall of 2022 from 180 Palestinian-owned family companies – 90 were located in Palestine and the other 90 were located in the USA. Using R software, multiple regression analysis was employed to examine the relationships between the constructs that formed the study's conceptual framework.
Findings
The results indicate that (1) the risk-taking, innovation and proactiveness dimensions of EO have a significant positive impact on the performance of Palestinian family-owned businesses; (2) Governance moderates the EO dimensions of risk-taking and proactiveness on the performance of Palestinian family-owned companies and (3) geographic location does not moderate the relationship between the EO and performance of Palestinian-owned family businesses.
Originality/value
The current intensified conflict in Palestine warrants exploring the role Palestinian family-owned businesses worldwide can play in rebuilding the local economies of Gaza and the West Bank. The following years will be crucial in determining how proactive risk-taking and innovation will support regional recovery and augment the entrepreneurial and reinvestment capacity of diasporic and home country-based Palestinian family-owned firms. Thus, our study into factors that might enhance these businesses' performance and growth potential is pertinent. A further contribution of this study is new insight into the particularities of Palestinian family-owned businesses, augmenting general theories associated with ethnic and diasporic entrepreneurship.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Dr. Suhail Sultan was a 2022/2023 recipient of the US Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program, who conducted this research during his stay at the University of San Francisco and its Gellert Family Business center.
Citation
Sultan, S., Hudson, M., Habash, N., Sultan, W.I.M. and Izhiman, N. (2024), "Entrepreneurial orientation and Palestinian family-owned businesses: does governance or geographic location make a difference?", Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 252-271. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSBED-01-2023-0045
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2024, Emerald Publishing Limited