Entrepreneurial Orientation: Its Relationship with the Entrepreneur’s Subjective Success in SMEs
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Some comments that should help the authors in improving the quality of the research.
- The title misses SMEs, because the authors analyzed the owner-manager perspective towards entrepreneurship in companies with less than 50 employees.
- Most of the Introduction Section is a Literature Review. Please rearrange.
- The authors explain what they will do, but they already did (Row 59). Please rephrase.
- Please explain what in entrepreneurship from your point of view. The Introduction is the perfect place.
- In my opinion the authors made a melange of job satisfaction and ownership, which is irrelevant. An owner will be satisfied if the company is competitive. Motivation and satisfaction belong to employees. The changing in the entrepreneur`s behavior should be highlighted. Please present some theories (Maslow, Herzberg, JCM, and others) to support your assumptions.
- What kind of entrepreneurs are you targeting for family business? There is a big difference between first owners and successors (family). Most of the time, successors are not satisfied, because they are forced to continue the family business. Did you consider this aspect?
- Is your sample relevant? How did you chose 655 companies from a total of 113.546?
- A 97% rate of returned questionnaires is almost unbelievable.
- You say that "90.2% live with their significant other, compared to 9.8% who live on their own". What do you mean?
- How do you explain the connection with entrepreneurship for the question “Compared to my expectations, right now, I am satisfied with my life”. The private life (divorce, scandals, and others) has nothing to do with the business. Maybe you should refer to professional satisfaction.
- A lot of references are outdated. Interesting you didn`t cite " (2020) Satisfaction of entrepreneurs: A comparison between founders and family business successors, Journal of Small Business Management, 58:3, 474-510, DOI: 10.1080/00472778.2019.1660937"
- In the end, who will benefit from the research? Please explain in the Conclusions Section.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Paper is organized very well and leads the reader from start to finish. There are few comments as noted bellow but in the general paper is very good.
In the first line, you state "The entrepreneurial orientation has often been contemplated from a corporate perspective." Who contemplated this - please show some evidence. Entrepreneurial orientation is not usually connected to the corporate perspective so pls references.
Why don't you put the name of the authors and then brackets i.e. line 48 page 2 ... In the opinion of (12) ... I understand the referencing style but this doesn't sound correct. There are examples of this in the whole paper. - Again if this is correct referencing than please skip this comment
Line 143 "most previous studies have linked ..." which studies - you can state most previous and then no references
Line 151 - again "However, some authors suggest...."- which authors suggest this
Line 316 maybe past tense "We use measures ...."
Pls connect the three parts of the documents since the page count starts from 1
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors, thank you for the opportunity to read your paper. It is devoted to an interesting issue of entrepreneurial success focusing on three important measure - innovative orientation, risk-taking orientation and proactive orientation. Determined hypotheses improve the scientific value of the paper. However, there are several weak points which need to be improved.
First of all, the authors use absolutely inappropriate style of in-text citations. The square brackets are needed to insert in-text references. Moreover, the brackets with citations are used instead of the subject, which is incorrect. E.g. L48: "In the opinion of (12),....." should be "In the opinion of Lian & Yen [12], ..."
The same problem is in L50, L51, L69, L92, L288-290, L321 and many others. It has to be revised throughout the paper.
Introduction - the introduction section of the paper is well-written, providing basic information about the issue, setting the aim and contribution of the study.
Literature review - the literature review is exhausting, but the authors should focus on the researches and studies of the last 2-3 year to underline the importance and relevance of the topic (especially the contributions of 2019 and 2020), e.g. when depicting the financial and non-financial aspects of entrepreneurial success, Kliestik et al. (2018) Bankruptcy prevention: New effort to reflect on legal and social changes, could be mentioned confirming the most important tools, which warn of financial problem few years in advance. Innovation orientation (L143...) and the crucial findings of last years is depicted in the bibliometric analysis of Durana et al. (2020) Disclosure of strategic managers´ factotum: behavioral incentives of innovative business, etc.
Materials and methods - Is the period of years long enough to portray the results? please declare.
L314-315 - writing the results, it is necessary to use zero - not only .75 or even 75 (it is really confusing), same problem L353. Please, revise in the paper.
Tables 1 and 2 - it is a mess. Please, rewrite it, so that it can be easily recognizable which number belongs to which column (variable). Either use a different style of table or depict only the most important results.
The results in the tables have to be clearly explained (which is missing).
L348-349 declare that the validity of the model is evaluated by R squared, adj. R squatted and F test. Despite the fact that these results are in the tables, there is not a mere mention of it in the results section. Why the results are not explained using these measures?
Can the results be explained as "satisfactory" due to the low level of R squared? Please explain.
Are the hypotheses confirmed or rejected?
The results should be clearly portrayed also in the conclusion section focusing on the most relevant and most interesting finding.
Other comments:
Hypotheses Hb is missing dot (at the end of the sentence) in all its versions.
L256-257 should be rewritten into plural.
Please, check the punctuation again.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors made all the requested changes.
Congratulations for the quality of the research.
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors,
all the recommendations and comments were revised /added, the tables are easier to read, there are no grammar mistakes and the in-text references are as they should be. Thank you.
