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Motivation of female entrepreneurs: a cross-national study
Abstract
Purpose – This paper focuses on the motivation of females to start businesses in developed and emerging
economies. Although the issues related to the motivation of entrepreneurs have been widely studied, there are
a few studies focusing on the differences in women’s entrepreneurial motivation in countries with different
levels of market economy development. Furthermore, existing studies on female founders mainly adapt the
concepts that have often been developed in male-dominated paradigm. The purpose of this paper is to explore
in depth motivations of female entrepreneurs in different contexts and discover the dissimilarities in women’s
entrepreneurial motivations in countries with different levels of economic development.
Design/methodology/approach – The qualitative research approach is applied in this study to explore the
social-driven and profit-drivenmotives of female entrepreneurs. The authors have employed purposeful sampling to
select cases. The authors investigated the motivations of 45 female entrepreneurs in Norway (12), Russia (21) and
Ukraine (12). Semi-structured interviews were used to collect primary data. The authors have also triangulated the
data collected frominterviews with the data available on the internet, company reports and newspaper publications.
Findings – The findings indicate that women often pursuit business opportunities to satisfy social needs,
rather than focusing on traditional business outcomes such as growth or profit. However, different contexts –
the emerging economies context of Russia and Ukraine and the developed one of Norway – seem to influence
the motivation to establish new ventures differently. The study found a stronger desire to contribute to a
society’s needs among female founders in Norway compared to their counterparts in Russia and Ukraine.
This indicates that cultural and social context in developed countries, such as in Norway, probably provides
more possibilities for female entrepreneurs for self-realisation elsewhere leaving more room for focusing on
societal issues in business in comparison with emerging countries contexts.
Originality/value – A novel conceptual contribution is the exploration of links between the social-driven
and profit-driven motives of female entrepreneurs in emerging and developed economises. The study also
adds to debates relating to context embeddedness of smaller firms.