Analysis of the Effects of Marketing Cooperative Strategies on Entrepreneurial Orientation of Agricultural Marketing Cooperative Unions in Western Oromia, Ethiopia

Abstract

Cooperative societies implement diversified marketing cooperative strategies (MCS), and it is
believed that practicing entrepreneurial orientation (EO) plays a wide-ranging role in the success of
cooperative firms' endeavors. From this perspective, the study intended to analyze the effects of MCS
on the EO of agricultural marketing cooperative (AMC) unions in Western Oromia. To achieve the
study objective, the data were collected from sample AMC unions by using semi-structured
questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and discussion. The collected data were analyzed using
descriptive data analysis methods, mainly the relative importance index (RII) to rank the MCS
implemented and EO practiced by the AMC unions of the study and ordinal logistic regression
(OLR) to explain and explore the effect of predictor variables on the response variable of the study.
The descriptive results of the study reveal that transaction cost reduction and diversification market
strategies are the top two ranked marketing strategies implemented by AMC unions in Western
Oromia. It is also found that autonomy, managerial entrepreneurial competence, and risk-taking are
the top three EO dimensions practiced by the AMC unions. From OLR analysis, the Nagelkerke
pseudo-R-square result (0.804) indicated that 80.4% of the EO practiced by the AMC of the case is
explained by the predictor variable used in the study. The parameter estimates from OLR analysis
reveal that all the explanatory variables included in the model have a statistically significant effect
on the EO of the AMC union. Regarding this, there is no evidence to support rejecting the
hypothesized association of marketing cooperative strategy dimensions with EO. Hence, the study
concluded that marketing strategies implemented have significant and positive effects on the
entrepreneurial orientation of AMC unions.