Critical criteria of women-owned SMES performance using multi-attribute decision making (MADM) of analytical hierarchy process (AHP)

Abstract

Faced with the vision that Malaysia will become a developing country by 2020, the Malaysian government is promoting the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth to be enhanced, while increasing the number of entrepreneurs in different sectors. Increasing the number of women entrepreneurs is one of the government's current initiatives in realizing the vision of being a well-developed country with a competitive economy, sustainable revenue, and stable social structure as a multiracial country. Several researchers have conducted studies on the relationships between Entrepreneurial Competencies (EC) and Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) dimensions towards women-owned SMEs' business performance, and overlooked the measurement of ranking the effective criteria and sub-criteria, which are the most important factor in contributing to their performance. This has become a crucial gap to be further investigated. Hence, this study evaluates the effective criteria that contribute most towards women-owned SMEs' performance by using Analytical Hierarchy Process, employing Super Decision software. The survey questionnaires were distributed among 140 respondents in Batu Pahat, district of Johor state. Yet, only 128 sets of questionnaires were usable for data analysis, with a 91.43% response rate. The findings indicate that EC and EO ranking criteria are equally important to the women-owned SMEs' performance. In contrast, the consistency ratio (CR) was found to be equal to zero. Consequently, CR will give value if the paired comparison is more than two criteria, and the consistency applies only to the pairwise comparison matrices.