Entrepreneurial behaviour identified among sme members of an international group with sustainability-oriented strategy

Abstract

The current development of energy management services is stimulated by a series of factors that are both external and industry-specific. One important external factor is the pressure coming from legal provisions in favour of sustainable development. This qualitative, descriptive research is focused on an international group with a strategic orientation to sustainability. The aim is to analyse the strategic changes of several group members over a period of 15 years (2004–2019) in order to identify their entrepreneurial behaviour (EB), contributing to scarce literature on EB of sustainability-oriented SMEs—medium-sized enterprises, in particular. The methodological approach included both secondary and primary research (direct observation and in-house interviews). The results match the research objectives and research questions in that they are able to identify different types and degrees of enterprise EB (EEB). The findings demonstrated here support a proposed finer EEB typology: independent EEB and induced EEB. Besides the natural limitations of the research (only comprising companies of a group and single industry), the main limitation of the study is its pre-pandemic characteristic, which is also a challenging research opportunity for further post-pandemic studies on EEB. The promising results of this exploratory research on EEB and novel EEB typology proposed should also be tested in more industries. The research results are useful for scholars, company managers, and entrepreneurs as well as for strategists involved in designing sustainable development policies.