Title: The relationships between social capital and organisational entrepreneurship at small and medium enterprises of Zanjan province

Authors: Reza Kiani Mavi; Zahra Amin Afshar

Addresses: Center for Innovative Practice, School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University (ECU), Joondalup 6027, Western Australia, Australia ' Department of Industrial Management, Faculty of Social Sciences, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to perform an empirical investigation on the impact of social capital (relational, structural and cognitive) on organisational entrepreneurship and the impact of organisational entrepreneurship on existence of opportunity, discovery of opportunity, decision to exploit opportunity, entrepreneurial strategy, resource acquisition and organising process. The statistical population of this study is SMEs' in Zanjan province. Seventy eight questionnaires with multiple choice questions were distributed among sample individuals. The research is based on structural equation model and partial least square method and Smart-PLS software were used for analysing the data in order to evaluate the relationship between variables and their impact on each other. Empirical results confirm that social capital has positive impact on organisational entrepreneurship. Among social capital dimensions, structural and relational capitals have positive impact on organisational entrepreneurship, but there is no positive relationship between cognitive dimension and organisational entrepreneurship. Clearly, organisational entrepreneurship process becomes stronger with the presence of social capital. The results of this study lead SMEs' managers to better understanding of these relations and improve their performance.

Keywords: social capital; organisational entrepreneurship; entrepreneurial process; relational capital; structural capital; cognitive capital; small and medium-sized enterprises; SMEs; Iran; entrepreneurial strategy; resource acquisition; entrepreneurial opportunities; structural equation modelling; SEM; partial least squares; PLS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIR.2017.082827

International Journal of Business Innovation and Research, 2017 Vol.12 No.4, pp.449 - 464

Received: 17 Mar 2014
Accepted: 26 Feb 2015
Published online: 13 Mar 2017 *

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