The effect of entrepreneurship on the performance of food industry companies in Gilan province

Academic Thesis for Master's Degree

Field: Public Administration Major: Human Resources

Summary

One of the main branches of entrepreneurship is organizational entrepreneurship, which undoubtedly has a significant contribution to the success and excellence of the organization. This factor leads to an innovation in production and competitive advantage and better performance of the organization. The acquisition of knowledge and knowledge-based resources also lead to the improvement of entrepreneurship and superior performance.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of organizational entrepreneurship on the performance of food industry companies in Gilan province, emphasizing the moderating role of knowledge management. The research method is descriptive and correlational, and the type of field research and data collection tool is questionnaire. The statistical population of the research is food manufacturing companies with more than 15 employees in Gilan province. In this research, the statistical sample under investigation is the number of 58 manufacturing companies in Gilan province, 33 companies were selected through non-probability sampling and 50 questionnaires were distributed among the managers of the companies, and 37 valid questionnaires were collected. Finally, the information has been analyzed. The results of this research showed that there is a significant relationship between knowledge management and entrepreneurship and between entrepreneurship and organizational performance at the 95% level (hypotheses 1, 2 and 3 were confirmed).

Introduction

In recent economic scenarios that are characterized by complexity and dynamics Organizations must have new reactions to survive and succeed. In such conditions, organizational entrepreneurial activities become highly important and become a necessary condition for wealth creation (Bojica & Fuentes, 2012). In the perspective of the 21st century, companies are in a competitive and complex situation affected by many factors such as globalization, technology development and the increasing speed of new technologies. In the framework of this perspective, companies must act differently from the past for their survival and progress, especially that they must look for new sources of competitive advantage and use new forms of competition, which itself requires a clear understanding of the nature and dynamics of competition in the present era (Jaafarpour, 2011). Therefore, in this chapter, the problem will be firstly stated, and then the importance and necessity of research and the theoretical framework and finally the research model will be discussed.

2-1- Statement of the problem

As long as the organizations try to survive, they know that they need to be present in the national and global arena, they should put the principle of continuous improvement at the forefront of their activities. The lack of a performance system in various dimensions of the organization, including the use of meeting the needs of employees, customers, and suppliers, is considered as one of the symptoms of an organization's disease, and on the other hand, the absence of an evaluation and control system in a system means a lack of communication with the environment inside and outside the organization, the consequences of which are old age and ultimately the death of the organization (Tolaei, 2016). Performance is the measurable results, decisions and actions of the organization that show the degree of success and achievements, and costs are considered a central part of performance. At the same time, performance includes almost every competitive goal and non-material excellence such as reliability, flexibility, quality and speed (Biyazi et al., 2008). In general, performance refers to the process of evaluating and measuring the performance of organizations in specific periods in such a way that the expectations and indicators to be judged are clear and communicated to the evaluation body in advance (Bikzad, Alizadeh, 2018). Accordingly, in this research, the rate of performance growth in the food industry with components such as growth and sales, market shares for main products, customer satisfaction, return on assets, return on capital, return on new sales, which are the most important indicators of performance evaluation, are used (Bohica & Fuentes, 2012).

Lampkin[1] and Des[2] in the last 10 years on the importance of using a probability structure in identifying factors affecting the relationship between entrepreneurship and organization performance. and its moderating role relied on basic knowledge and knowledge acquisition (Bohica & Fuentes, 2012).

Organizational entrepreneurship undoubtedly has a significant contribution to the success and excellence of organizations. It seems that paying special attention to the development of entrepreneurial components in the production and service processes of industries and expanding the culture of entrepreneurship among employees can be a suitable way to solve this problem (Imanipour, Zivdar, 2017).. Entrepreneurship is a management attitude that gives meaning to concepts such as innovation, flexibility and accountability in the shadow of understanding environmental opportunities (Zahra, 2005). Lumpkin and Des believe that one of the most important concepts used in describing and evaluating the entrepreneurial activity of the organization is organizational entrepreneurship. Organizational entrepreneurship occurs when an organization relies on growth and being active as well as using new opportunities, internal and external factors of the organization. In order to evaluate and check the level of entrepreneurship of the organization, it is possible to mention the indicators of innovation, predicting market demand and creating advantages from competitors (Bohica & Fuentes, 2012).

Since knowledge management is based on information processing or increasing the level of organizational learning, it has a close relationship with technology, and even in the absence of a specific and comprehensive definition of knowledge management, many will consider it synonymous with information technology. Karkulian [3] believes that knowledge management is an approach to create an organization whose members can acquire, share and create knowledge or use it for their decision-making activities (Gholamreza Dioklai et al., 2013). Experts are also of the opinion that knowledge management supports innovation, creation of new ideas and exploitation of the organization's thinking power (Mirfakhraldini et al., 2009). Knowledge management can be examined through the relationship with the organization regarding the market or around the needs and trends of clients, technical and technological skills (Bohica & Fuentes, 2012).

According to the content raised and the importance of the issue in SMES industries for the growth and progress and entrepreneurship of the organization and to have survival and customer orientation, there is the issue of how much the industries were able to commit to their assets in a research that Ana Maria Bohica and Maria Del Marfontes [4] in an article entitled "Knowledge acquisition and organizational entrepreneurship" has investigated the effect of knowledge acquisition and organizational entrepreneurship on performance and concluded that both knowledge acquisition and organizational entrepreneurship have a positive effect on performance, but if knowledge acquisition is included as a moderating variable of the relationship between organizational entrepreneurship and performance, it has a negative effect, and the degree of this effect is influenced by the level of knowledge resources of companies (Bojica & Fuentes, 2012).

According to The contents of the main research questions:

Will entrepreneurship have an effect on the performance of the food industry?

Is the moderating role of acquiring knowledge and knowledge-based in entrepreneurship and performance effective?

1-3- Necessity of the importance of research

Today, titles such as successful organization, lasting, ideal, path to excellence, excellent, transcendental, etc. Among the common terms in the field of study are organization and management, and various groups of people seek to identify and introduce the characteristics of such organizations. An organization with superior performance is an organization that achieves better results than Hamratz organizations in a long-term period through the ability to properly adapt to changes, respond quickly to these changes, create a coherent and targeted management structure, continuously improve key capabilities, and treat employees appropriately as the main asset (Aghili et al., 2018; 50). Organizational performance refers to the amount of success of an organization over time, its ability to respond to environmental demands and other stakeholders who want their organization to move far beyond the status quo (Akrivou & Huang, 2011). With the increase of globalization and the saturation of the labor market due to the recent economic recession, they have more organizational performance than allocating the necessary time and efforts to improve organizational performance by accelerating economic growth. Since by improving the performance of the organization, it is able to better meet the demands, needs and expectations of the stakeholders (Schiuma & Lerro, 2008).

1-4- Research objectives

Based on the materials mentioned in the statement of the problem and the importance of the research topic, the purpose of this research is the effect of entrepreneurship on the performance of companies with an emphasis on the moderating role of knowledge management.