The Impact of External Drivers on Women Entrepreneurs Perception towards Supplier Performance in Nigerian SME Practices: The Mediating Effect of Enforcement Mechanisms

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to critically examine the influence of government policies, customers, competitors as a driver and to some extent interventions to women entrepreneurship motivation in relation to its impact on social enforcement mechanism and supplier performance. The environment where women embark on entrepreneurial activities was articulated as one of the conditioned factors. Coupled with the harsh credit facilities and segregated opportunity prevailing itself to curtailed the untold hardships faced by women entrepreneurs for the success of their respective businesses which is not far from SME. This in turn influences the women entrepreneurs towards utilization of the available governance mechanism in nurturing their channel network relationship in achieving supplier performance. Even with burgeon of empirical investigation of the impact of institutional pressures on environmental practices, how these drivers affects social assets towards realization of supplier performance remains unclear. Social enforcement is seen as one of the alternatives used to curtailed supplier opportunism in realization of superior supplier performance. How does the social enforcement enhance supplier performance as a result of institutional pressures in the Nigerian women’s micro, small and medium scale enterprise is still novel and unexplored?