ENTREPRENEURIAL COMPETENCIES A PREDICTOR OF FIRM PERFORMANCE AMONG THE WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS OF COIMBATORE CITY

Abstract

Entrepreneurship can be defined as the capacity and willingness to develop, organize and manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit. As easy as that may sound, it is very difficult to accomplish in reality. Unlike organizations where work is delegated among a number of individuals, an entrepreneurial venture has all its crucial work shouldered by a single individual-The Entrepreneur (Prajapathi and Rathod, 2014). Thus the skills, capabilities, traits also called the competencies, influence the success of an entrepreneurial venture. This is based on the idea put forth by Chandler and Hanks, (1994) that a start up is basically an extension of its founder. This is truer in case of women entrepreneurs, given the very little support and motivation they receive from the society and the humungous task of balancing work and family that quite naturally falls on them. This probably is the reason why a woman entrepreneur differs from her male counterparts. The present study tries to analyze the role of entrepreneurial competencies in predicting the firm performance of women entrepreneurs. Data from 150 women entrepreneurs who have been running a registered firm for at least 3 years has been collected and analyzed using SPSS 21. Results reveal that the entrepreneurial competencies are positively related to the firm performance of these women entrepreneurs.