L’ambition est-elle la clé du succès ? Une étude de PME européennes

Ambitious entrepreneurship is rare but its economic impact is far stronger than less or non-ambitious entrepreneurial activity. Current research in this emergent field of inquiry focuses on a declarative ambition, an intention or a motivation to grow, and essentially examines its effects on the short-term, finding mixed results. Building on the theory of planned behavior and the concept of sustainable growth, we introduce the notion of ambitious behavior to describe the realization of an ambition intention. We then test for the impact of an ambitious behavior on ambition realization defined as high growth on a sample of 1970 European SMEs and find a significant positive relationship. We also test for possible moderating effects on this relationship of the presence of external investors, presence of an entrepreneurial team, entrepreneurial management style, and environmental dynamism. We find significant results albeit counter-intuitive. We thereby have multiple contributions : theoretical (to the literatures on SMEs growth and ambitious entrepreneurship), methodological (mainly based on our measurement of an ambitious behavior), and practical (notably with regard to public policies).