Job Resourcefulness and Entrepreneurial Behavior in Organizational Contexts: Integrating Identity and Social Cognitive Theories

Strategic renewal in a resource-constrained environment coupled with the trend of former entrepreneurs returning to salaried employment has put a premium on understanding and effectively managing the motivational drivers of employee entrepreneurial behavior. We contribute to this stream of research by integrating identity and social cognitive theories to examine whether job resourcefulness relates to entrepreneurial behavior and the psychological processes that underpin this relationship at both individual and team levels. Multi-source and multi-wave data obtained from employees, supervisors, and department managers of established organizations in China were used to test our hypothesized relationships. Results of multilevel path analysis show that across both individual and team levels, entrepreneurial identity aspiration and entrepreneurial self-efficacy serially transmit the effect of job resourcefulness onto entrepreneurial behavior. The results further show that proactive climate moderates the relationship between job resourcefulness and entrepreneurial identity aspiration at the team (but not at the individual) level such that this relationship is stronger when proactive climate is high but not low. We supplement the preceding findings with interview data from respondents (employees, supervisors, and managers) drawn from a handful of the participating organizations.