Adaptation of Road Goods Transportation Entrepreneurs to Enhance Firm's Performance in the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) Areas of Thailand

This research aims to 1) study adaptation of road goods transportation entrepreneurs that influences firm’s performance and 2) build an adaptation model of road goods transportation entrepreneurs and provide implementation guidelines to executives. The research was designed as a mixed method. The population consisted of 3,832 road goods transportation’s entrepreneurs in three eastern provinces of the Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) namely; Chachoengsao, Chonburi, and Rayong provinces. The sample was stratified randomly selected consisting of 26 companies (820 people) for questionnaire survey and purposive selected consisting of 9 companies (18 people) for in-depth interview. The research tools passed validity and reliability tests. Data were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and Path Analysis. The findings revealed that firstly for influencing of each variable; (1) adaptation of entrepreneurs (AOE) has direct positive effects to firm’s performance (FP) (0.61) but has no indirect effects due to indirect influence value (0.21) which is not statistical significant, (2) adaptation of entrepreneurs (AOE) effects to both agility of business and organization (ABO) (0.98) also flexibility of transportation operations (FTO) (0.95), and (3) agility of business and organization (ABO) and flexibility of transportation operations (FTO) both has no positive direct effects to firm’s performance (FP) (0.61, 0.40) with no statistical significance. Secondly, for building an adaptation model, findings revealed that the model must consist of 2 main components which are; (1) the adaptation of entrepreneur (ABO) including two subcomponents namely, agility of business and organization (ABO) and flexibility of transportation operations (FTO), due to these subcomponents both have positive direct effects to adaptation of entrepreneur, (2) for firm’s performance (FP) and implementation guidelines, the entrepreneurs must first focus on building abilities in both responsiveness (RS) (0.84) also resources and vehicles management (RM) (0.88) which will benefit in increasing income successively (II) (0.81).