ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AND BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY: A STUDY OF SAFETY EQUIPMENT FIRMS IN RIVERS STATE, NIGERIA

Safety equipment firms are a critical component of Nigeria’s Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which constitute a major backbone of the National economy, contributing significantly to employment. They are integral to Nigeria’s economic growth, especially in high-risk industries such as oil and gas, construction, manufacturing, and mining. These sectors significantly contribute to Nigeria’s GDP and employment rates. Unfortunately, in Nigeria, many SMEs and family-owned businesses often struggle to survive beyond the second generation. Often implicated in this Business Sustainability challenge is poor Entrepreneurial Succession Planning. Non-the-less the place of succession planning in SME venture sustainability remains a subject of debate and research. This study seeks to establish the practical significance of succession planning as a predictor of business sustainability amongst safety equipment firms in the oil-rich Rivers State of Nigeria. It operationalizes succession planning – the predictor variable - as Entrepreneurial Leadership Development which it matches against three operational dimensions of business sustainability, the criterion, namely: Sustainable Risk Mitigation, Sustainable Innovation, and Sustainable Resilience. 300 copies of validated questionnaire structured on 5-points Likert scale were administered to respondents across 60 safety equipment firms to obtain requisite data for the study. Analysis of the data so obtained was done using Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modelling (PLS_SEM) which was conducted with the aid of SMART PLS. The results revealed that Entrepreneurial Leadership Development has a significant positive relationship with the three proxies of business sustainability employed in the study. In the light of the findings, the study recommends that tailored leadership development programmes and training should be organized routinely for potential leaders to help identify and groom future executives from within the organization.