Entrepreneurial resourcefulness : The role of emotions and the community

The purpose of this dissertation is to enhance our understanding of the influences on the resourcefulness of entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial resourcefulness describes the resourceful behaviors that creatively utilize and mobilize the available resources. Research lacks a unified structure to provide understanding about the influences on resourceful behaviors. The first article, systematic literature review, explores the state of the art of the literature to understand the influences on entrepreneurial resourcefulness, on the individual/entrepreneur level, organizational level, and community level. The second article introduces the concept of emotional entrepreneurial resourcefulness, emotion-laden behaviours that pertain to the creative management and deployment of the resources at hand and identifies how and when emotions can become an important component of an entrepreneur’s overall resourcefulness. The third article explores the impact of collective affective experiences on the resourcefulness of entrepreneurs, and that fluctuating resources generate affective experiences that emerge as catalytic, core, and transformational, based on the emotions and behaviors of the entrepreneurs and the members of their community, emerging as collective psychological ownership. The fourth article adopts an agentic perspective on resourcefulness and the impact of how negative emotions influence entrepreneurial resourcefulness in a setting of extreme limited resources, and therefore, self-reliant and joint resourcefulness emerge from high, moderate, and low activation of negative emotions. The dissertation extends the literature within entrepreneurship, building theory, and undertaking in-depth empirical work. Policy-level implications focus on understanding and developing strategies to manage the impact of psychological aspects and the role of the entrepreneurial community for effective resource management.