Attaining high sales growth in a highly uncertain environment in the Singapore automotive sector : role of SMEs' entrepreneurial orientation.

Abstract

This paper aims to assess the role of Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) in attaining high sales growth in a highly uncertain environment in the Singapore automotive industry. Dissimilar to past entrepreneurship research, this study is specifically conducted in the context of a highly uncertain environment in the Singapore automotive industry. The EO scale that was devised by Miller and Friesen (1982) and reviewed by Covin and Slevin (1989) is employed in this research due to its high multi-country consistency and reliability. Correlation and Chi-square statistical tests were used to test the relationship between EO and firms‟ performance using multidimensional and uni-dimensional approaches. The results obtained are not significant and the environmental constraints causing high environmental uncertainty appear to be the most apparent reasons for the inconsistency of this study‟s results with previous findings. Further development of the EO scale, such as operationalizing the 2 additional dimensions of EO by Lumpkin and Dess (1996), is essential for future theoretical development in the field of entrepreneurship. It is suggested in this study that the EO should be applied to industry that control their upstream value chain like research and development.