Assessing the Dimensionality of Business Success: The Perspectives of Malaysian SME Owner-Managers

Realizing that the measurement of success in the context of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) is somewhat disparaging, this study aims to validate the business success construct based on the perspectives of SME founder-managers in the Malaysian context. Following a data collection of a sample of 212 SME founder-managers, a confirmatory factor analysis was performed to examine the factorial validity of the success measure and to assess its goodness of fit. The result indicates that business success is a four-factor structure, reflecting in (a) satisfaction with financial performance, (b) satisfaction with non-financial performance, (c) performance relative to competitors, and (d) business growth.