How Proactiveness and Entrepreneurial Resilience Drive Business Innovation

This paper explores the relationship between innovativeness, proactiveness, perceived organizational support (POS), entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial resilience amongst university students in the city of Gujranwala, Pakistan. Based on the Entrepreneurial Orientation Theory, Social Exchange Theory, and Theory of Planned Behavior, the study has quantitative and cross-sectional research designs and 450 participants were interviewed using self-administered questionnaires. Regression analysis and Hayes PROCESS macro were used to test the hypotheses entailing analysis of mediation. Findings indicated that innovativeness (0.38, p < 0.001) and proactiveness (0.42, p < 0.001) exerted a positive significant influence on the entrepreneurial intention whereas POS had adverse effects on it (0.24, p < 0.01). Entrepreneurial intention was a powerful predictor of resilience (with the standardized coefficient being 0.53 and the p -value being less than 0.001), and mediated the relationship between innovativeness to resilience (with the standardized coefficient being 0.20) and proactiveness to resilience (with the standardized coefficient being 0.22). POS was found to have a small direct positive relation to resilience (beta -0.12, p -0.06) and a negative relationship on intention (beta -0.13). These results provide evidence of the pivotal importance of personal traits in the cultivation of entrepreneurial resilience and point to the two sides of organizational support: it can repel entrepreneurial intention with the undisputed (theoretical) potential to impair resilience but it can also foster it. On the one hand, theoretical contributions serve to consolidate both the entrepreneurial orientation and resilience literature, and on the other hand, the practical implications point at specific interventions to be introduced by educators, policy formulators, and organisations in order to promote adaptive entrepreneurial orientations. Weaknesses are the regional sample and cross-sectional study that requires future longitudinal and cross cultural studies.