MALAYSIAN CRAFTPRENEURS OPERATIONS: ASSESSING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SUSTAINABLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP INVOLVING ENTREPRENEURIAL MOTIVATION, COMMITMENT AND GROWTH PERFORMANCE

This paper explores the emergence and possibilities of sustainable entrepreneurship as a new field of knowledge in the Malaysian craft industry. Fundamentally, the paper focusses on assessing the relationship between entrepreneurial motivation in sustainable entrepreneurship involving business commitment and growth. This research used a path-model survey to acquire the causal relationships and multiple regressions to verify the R-square with data derived from 380 craftpreneurs in Kraftangan Malaysia. The results found that the first layer of the path-diagram indicated 37.8% of variance in growth performance was determined by factors involving entrepreneurial motivation and business commitment, and 43.3% of business commitment was determined by factors involving entrepreneurial motivation. The findings imply that business commitment emerges as a prominent intermediary and moderating variable in discerning the relationship between sustainable entrepreneurial motivation and growth performance. Finally, the results also imply that entrepreneurial motivation is a crucial factor in developing sustainable entrepreneurship, involving business commitment and growth.