Inter-linkages among Factors and their Association with Enterprise Growth

Chapter 4 was devoted primarily to the identification of the major concerns and orientations of entrepreneurial individuals through factor analyses of the different variable groups. This chapter investigates the inter-relationships among these factors, with a view, hopefully, to providing partial explanations to the phenomenon of enterprise growth. Since the t-tests discussed in Chapter 3 showed that there are but a few variables that are significantly different for the high-growth and low-growth ventures and that, even for these, the confidence level is not very high, we do not expect that the general entrepreneurial orientations can provide any explanation to the phenomenon of enterprise growth. Hence, we extracted another set of factors from the variables that are significantly different for the two groups. This chapter will begin with an analysis of inter-correlations among these two sets of factors separately. Performance variables such as profitability and enterprise growth will be added to these two sets with a view to finding out how these are correlated with the other variables. Since there is no theoretical reason to expect correlations between industry growth and the person-specific or enterprise-specific variables, the former is not included in the correlation analysis.