Introduction:

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) has been widely recognized in the strategic management field, because it represents a key factor to obtain a better performance. Entrepreneurial oriented firms are monitoring its environment, making innovations, taking risks, searching for opportunities, anticipating to the customer needs and responding to the aggressive actions from its competence. The object of this research is to analyze the relationship between the EO and the firm performance in the Mexican handcraft sector.

Method:

This research was cross-sectional with the application of a survey to 170 Mexican artisans from Oaxaca, Guerrero, Puebla and Tlaxcala. The exploratory factorial analysis was used to test the validity of the scale; the reliability was test by the Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient. In order to test the five hypothesis of the research model, a bivariate correlation analysis and a linear regression analysis was made among all the research variables.

Results:

Results show that innovativeness, proactiveness and aggressive competitiveness are the variables that are related positively and directly with the financial and non-financial performance of the handcraft business in Mexico.

Discussion or Conclusion:

This paper could be one of the first research in analyze the performance in handcraft businesses under the EO focus. It gives some opportunities in the research field: a deeper analysis of each variable, to test the EO scale in other kind of businesses and sectors, a better conceptualization and operationalization of variables in order to make much more detailed statistical analysis, and determinate exactly the effect of the OE variables in the firm performance.