MAPPING ENTREPRENEURIAL COMPETENCIES AND ITS INFLUENCE ON BUSINESS RESILIENCE AND PERFORMANCE IN INDONESIA MSMES

• Main Author: Hanifan, Rozan
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/71377
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Although research on entrepreneurial competencies has been widely carried out in the last decades, this topic is still preliminary. Underlined by the disaster and crisis management theory, entrepreneurial competencies are expected to give a company both long-term adaptability and innovation abilities that may result in significant improvements in their business as well as the short-term coping capacity to recover from violent shocks. Moreover, the resource-based view theory also implies that entrepreneurial competencies are a firm's intangible assets that can promote a business's competitive advantage. Thus, entrepreneurial competencies are believed to be the main drivers in leveraging business resilience and performance. Rather than large companies, MSMEs are more vulnerable and find it difficult to adapt to resilience issues. Taking the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, there were 2.78 million MSMEs in Indonesia which were severely affected by this pandemic, and in some extreme cases, most of them even stopped operating. Despite its fragility, MSMEs are the backbone of the Indonesian economy. In addition, no research explains what entrepreneurial competencies are necessary and sufficient for MSMEs to survive in today's new normal era. Therefore, this study aims to map the quality of MSME actors in Indonesia while simultaneously creating a novel structural model that explains the influence of entrepreneurial competencies on business resilience and performance in a symmetrical and configurational manner. This study adopts Man's (2001) entrepreneurial competencies framework comprising commitment, conceptual, learning, personal, relationship, opportunity, organizing, and strategic competencies. These several organizational capabilities were also included in the structural model and act as mediator variables: dynamic capability, innovation ambidexterity and social network. This study adopts a positivist paradigm and is classified as an explanatory study. Through survey strategies and purposive sampling, a sample of 379 Indonesian MSME actors got involved in this study. The data were collected using internet-mediated and paperbased questionnaires cross-sectionally from April to November 2022 in West Java, Indonesia. This study utilized descriptive, PLS, and NCA-fsQCA analysis as the data analysis method. The results show that commitment, personal, and learning competencies are the three best competencies of MSME actors in West Java. This study also found entrepreneurial competencies that significantly impact business resilience with complementary partially mediated by dynamic capability, innovation ambidexterity, and social networks. Besides, entrepreneurial competencies also indirectly affect business performance by being fully mediated by dynamic capability and social networks. Lastly, this study proposes that all entrepreneurial competencies elements by Man (2001) are necessary and can form the best configuration for MSMEs actors to thrive in business resilience and performance. From these results, this study suggests that business practitioners should become more aware of their competencies to survive in this ambiguous world. In addition, the government must ensure that all middle and lower entrepreneurs have appropriate competencies to continue to compete by conducting a more intensive and comprehensive training initiative. This study contributes theoretically by presenting a novel conceptual framework that simultaneously addresses the influence of entrepreneurial competencies on business resilience and performance. This framework also benefits the MSMEs industry by giving a robust insight into how entrepreneurial competencies can guide businesses to survive and perform under an uncertain business climate. Thus, this study is expected to help Indonesian MSMEs to emerge from several resilience issues, such as the COVID- 19 pandemic.