Title: Entrepreneurial morality: some indications from Greece

Authors: George C. Bitros, Anastassios D. Karayiannis

Addresses: Department of Economics, Athens University of Economics and Business, 76 Patission Street, 10434, Athens, Greece. ' Department of Economics, University of Piraeus, 80, Karaoli & Dimitriou, 18534, Piraeus, Greece

Abstract: In countries with relatively small firms, entrepreneurial morality is determined by the influences that shape the values, the personality and the character of entrepreneurs as owners and managers of their enterprises. To shed some light on the processes involved we estimate an ordered probit model using data from 1643 enterprises, which were collected in Greece in the spring of 2006. We find that localised and generalised morality, the family and the family and the educational environment, the level of education, the size of firms, the level of education, the size of firms and the moral factors that contribute to success in business, determine entrepreneurial morality in a statistically significant way. By contrast, even though we experimented with other influences, such as the age of enterprises, the gender of entrepreneurs, the location of schools where they grew up, etc., none of them turned out to exert perceptible impacts.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; entrepreneurial morality; Greece; small and medium-sized enterprises; SMEs; family; education levels; educational environment; firm size; entrepreneurs.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIM.2010.033606

European Journal of International Management, 2010 Vol.4 No.4, pp.333 - 361

Published online: 07 Jun 2010 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article