Environmental, Personality and Motivational Factors: A Comparison Study between Women Entrepreneurs and Women Non Entrepreneurs in Malaysia

Abstract

Entreprenership has been observed as one of the important factors that help to lift the economy of a nation. Due to the fact that women play an equal role in the development of a country, this study aims to identify the environmental, personality and motivational factors that may lead to entrepreneurial decision. A comparison of these three factors is studied among women entrepreneurs in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with women non-entrepreneurs. A thorough literature had been reviewed to understand the entrepreneurial decision among women. This study is based on a questionnaire survey and the results indicate that there is a significant difference in environmental, personality and motivational factors among women entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs. The environmental factors found psychological support, benefit from environment, and previous work condition as significant predictors of women entreprenuership while the nine significant personality differences observed in this study are that the entrepreneurs portray more reasoning skills, emotional stability, vigilance and abstractness. Apart from that, entrepreneurs are also found to have more privateness, high openness to change, perfectionism, more tension and less liveliness. Finally for motivation factors, results revealed that individual core is not a significant predictor of women entreprenuership.