Franchisee satisfaction of goal attainment: a discovery of hierarcy of entrepreneur goals

<jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-heading">Purpose</jats:title><jats:p>– This study aims to investigate the extent to which franchisees are satisfied with the attainment of their personal goals in business. Although franchising continues to be exploited in the business sector, research and studies of franchising were scarcely mentioned in the organizational literature. Obviously, franchising as a body of knowledge has been studied mostly from the franchisor’s perspective than on franchisees. Within franchisee literature, studies on people’s motivation to become a franchisee have received some attention and provided little understanding, but no study has ever measured to what extent franchisees are satisfied with their personal goals in the business.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-heading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title><jats:p>– To investigate the hypotheses, a positivist approach is chosen as the philosophical foundation of this study, and all methodological aspects related with this approach are used in this study. A total of 204 franchisee entrepreneurs in Malaysia were surveyed and answered self-administered questionnaires.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-heading">Findings</jats:title><jats:p>– In general, statistical analysis suggests franchisees were satisfied with their goals attainments. However, further analysis shows that franchisees were mostly satisfied with intrinsic rewards goals, followed by perceived autonomy goals and family concern goals. Surprisingly, franchisees have less satisfaction with economic gain goals comparatively with other goals. Moreover, based on the conceptual analysis and empirical evidence, hierarchy of economic goals and hierarchy of family goals are discovered. Besides, this study does suggest that franchisees’ sustainability in the business may be affected by attainment of their personal goals.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-heading">Originality/value</jats:title><jats:p>– This paper studies franchising from a franchisee’s perspective and from a non-Western perspective. It investigates whether franchisee entrepreneurs share similar goals compared with other types of entrepreneurs and to what extent franchisees are satisfied with their personal goal attainment in the business.</jats:p></jats:sec>