Impact of environmental and organizational factors on emerging corporate entrepreneurship and firm performance: A study of Iranian manufacturing SMEs

Nations such as Iran have suffered due to a kind of historical determinism, and to walk the path that others (developed and developing countries) have trodden is now a challenge. Nevertheless, corporate entrepreneurship is influenced by organization and environmental factors and is regarded as a preventive and progressive factor. Generally, corporate entrepreneurship can highly impact the organizational performance and recognizing the environmental and organizational factors can lead to entrepreneurship development and improving organizational performance. In addition, environmental and organizational factors in addition to impacting organizational performance directly can also use the corporate entrepreneurship and indirectly influence the organizational performance and by recognizing these factors, the organizational performance can be improved. Thus, on this basis and in compliance with the importance of the previously mentioned issue, this research intends to offer a corporate entrepreneurship in small and medium size enterprises in Iran. According to the Iran Statistical Yearbook (2009), there were 14007 small and medium sized enterprises, distributed across nine industries. Accordingly, the stratified sampling technique was employed in the selection of SMEs, which are involved in the manufacturing sector in Iran. In this research, the relationship between environmental and organizational factor with corporate entrepreneurship and the relationship between these variables with organizational performance as well as the mediating role of corporate entrepreneurship and organization performance is studied