Resourcefulness research has provided many insights into how entrepreneurs do more with less, yet these studies are focused primarily on resourceful behaviors undertaken by singular actors. However, partnerships may also behave resourcefully to positively influence venture growth and sustainable outcomes. Through a qualitative study of 11 small enterprises in business partnerships with a common resource-rich partner in Mexico, we show how such partnerships yield uniquely resourceful behaviors. Our analysis also reveals that such partnership-based behaviors require distinct capacity building for resourcefulness. We thus extend theory by creating a process model in which resourcefulness mediates the relationship between nonmarket logics/informal governance and sustainable outcomes.

This study investigates how country-level digital infrastructure shapes the relationships between the action-formation mechanisms of socio-cognitive traits, i.e., entrepreneurial self-efficacy, fear of failure, and opportunity recognition, and entrepreneurial action. We amalgamate the agent-centric social cognitive theory with the external enabler framework and apply mechanism-based theorizing to explain how access-related mechanisms provided by digital infrastructure influence entrepreneurial action-formation. Based on a multilevel analysis of 344,265 individual-level observations from 46 countries and an additional robustness analysis of 391,119 individuals from 53 countries, we find that an individual's proclivity to starting a new venture is contingent upon the level of the digital infrastructure of a country. The empirical results show that a country's digital infrastructure is an external enabler that moderates the relationship between socio-cognitive traits and entrepreneurial action.

The voice is often the only continuous channel of expression in pitch videos. We isolate the influence of entrepreneurs' vocal expressions on funding by examining how valence (positivity/negativity) and arousal (activation) shape funders' perceptions of passion and preparedness. We show that an entrepreneur's high-arousal vocal expressions, whether positive or negative, increase perceptions of their passion. Entrepreneurs are perceived as more prepared when the valence and arousal of their vocal expressions are congruent. We test our hypotheses in the context of rewards-based crowdfunding, using both an experiment and a speech affect analysis of real-world crowdfunding pitches.

We integrate social cognitive theory, and its tenets of personal and collective agency, to develop an individual-level perspective on entrepreneurs' resourcefulness behaviors that illustrates how resourcefulness behaviors can be classified as ‘self-reliant behaviors’ or ‘joint resourcefulness behaviors’. Using this novel cognitive theoretical approach, we provide and test a framework that explains how dispositional, perceptual, and behavioral factors interact in the enactment of purposeful action with regards to entrepreneurs' resourceful behaviors. Consistent with our hypotheses, results from a quantitative study of entrepreneurs (N = 178), as well as a supplemental study involving qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs (N = 15), highlight that entrepreneurs higher in frugality tend to perceive higher levels of environmental hostility. This relationship, in turn, leads to higher amounts of self-reliant resourcefulness behaviors (i.e., customer-related and internal self-financing bootstrapping behaviors) but not joint resourcefulness behaviors. Multiple theoretical and practical contributions emerge from our findings as the extant literature does not yet account for human agency as a reason why some entrepreneurs may choose to engage in certain resourceful behaviors relative to other behaviors.