Entrepreneur's social identity, decision logic, and resource bootstrapping behaviors: An empirical study of the fsQCA method.

ABSTRACT

While resource bootstrapping is widely employed by novice entrepreneurs,and social identities and decision logic are studied as important antecedents of entrepreneurs' adoption of resource bootstrapping behaviors, both scholars and practitioners have but a hazy understanding on the configuration effect of entrepreneur's social identities and decision logic on resource bootstrapping behaviors. In this paper, we combined the necessary condition analysis (NCA) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to explore the configuration effects of entrepreneur's social identity and decision logic on resource bootstrapping behaviors. Analysis of 411 questionnaire date acquired from novice entrepreneurs, we found that none of single antecedent condition of both the entrepreneur's social identity and decision logic constitute the necessary condition of novice entrepreneurs' high resource bootstrapping behaviors. We also found a substitutive relationship between Darwinian social identity and communitary social identity that will lead the novice entrepreneurs with high dual effectual-causal decision logic to choose high joint utilization bootstrapping, and a complementary relationship between the three social identities of novice entrepreneurs such that those with high dual effectual-causal decision logic prefer different resource bootstrapping behaviors because of different social identities.Furthermore, we found that the core and edge conditions in the decision logic play different roles in the resource bootstrapping behaviors of novice entrepreneurs, with the core decision logic conditions having a greater impact on the resource bootstrapping behaviors. These findings deepen our understanding of the causal complexity among entrepreneur's social identity, decision logic and resource bootstrapping behaviors. It also provides theoretical guidance for effective resource integration for novice entrepreneurs facing resource constraints.