Risk Management Process, Owner’s Characteristics and Business Performance of SMEs

Internationally, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) has been recognized as an important strategic sector in both developed and developing countries. In Sri Lanka, SME sector causes vigorous impact in the economy for promoting growth and social development. Even though, the potential contribution is substantial SMEs are struggle with risk management and survival problem in Sri Lankan economy. Further, there are recognized empirical, methodological and practical research gaps in the field of risk management of SMEs. Therefore, the aims of the study was to develop a model to investigate how risk management process and owner’s characteristics significantly impact on business performance of SMEs. Thus, a systematic literature review was carried out by applying measures such as key words, language, type of the article, time frame and specially Emerald Insight, Google Scholar, and Science Direct libraries were considered. The systematic literature review facilitated to recognize justifiable research gaps and develop a model to show the behavior of risk management process and owner’s characteristics on business performance of SMEs. The developed model can be used by researchers for conducting a quantitative analysis and thus it will fill existing theoretical research gaps. Further, results of such a quantitative analysis will help to develop a discussion comparing and contrasting with results of other studies. Thus, this study helps to fill existing empirical research gaps also.