Social innovation in Saudi Arabia: The role of entrepreneurs’ spirituality, ego resilience and alertness

ABSTRACT

Using upper echelons and the entrepreneurship event model as theoretical umbrellas, we develop a model suggesting that, under munificent but resistant contexts, the interaction between entrepreneurs’ vertical and horizontal spirituality and their ego resilience and alertness prompt social innovation – as inclusiveness, frugality, and flexibility – at their firms. Using a sample of 85 Saudi entrepreneurs, we find that the interaction between entrepreneurs’ ego resilience and vertical and horizontal spirituality drive innovation inclusiveness. Also, we find that while the interaction between entrepreneurs’ alertness and vertical and horizontal spirituality drive innovation frugality, the interaction between entrepreneurs’ alertness and horizontal spirituality drive innovation flexibility. Lastly, data reveal that when entrepreneurs have low levels of vertical spirituality and alertness, their high levels of resilience drive the highest level of innovation frugality. We highlight the importance that entrepreneurs’ mindsets as values and beliefs, personality, and cognitive schema have in social entrepreneurial activity at their firms.

KEYWORDS:

• Social innovation
• innovation inclusiveness
• innovation frugality
• innovation flexibility
• ego resilience
• vertical and horizontal spirituality
• entrepreneurial alertness
• Saudi Arabia

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Dr. Maw-Der Foo for their developmental comments about our manuscript. We would also like to thank Dr. Dave Arena for helpful suggestions during the revision process, and Al-Muallem Mohammed Bin Ladin Chair for Creativity and Entrepreneurship and the Deanship of Scientific Research at Umm Al-Qura University for funding support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The theory of planned behavior (Azjen, 1991) is an alternate and similar theoretical framework that would prescribe a similar model to the one derived by SEE and presented here. For parsimony purposes, we focus on SEE.

² However, 100% of Saudi Nationals are Muslim, and our sample consists only of Saudi nationals.

³ The FMS has been found to be highly correlated with other measures of spirituality, and thus, has been found to be appropriate (Piedmont & Nelson, 2001).

⁴ When we compare the four-factor model (spirituality, ego resilience, alertness, and social innovation) and the five-factor model (spirituality, ego resilience, alertness, innovation inclusiveness, and innovation frugality), results are consistent with the expectation that innovation frugality and innovation inclusiveness are two separate constructs. In this case, the five-factor model significantly improves the data fit (∆χ² = 72.076, ∆df = 4, p-value = 0.00001).

⁵ We used a two-tailed multiple regression random model that required as input the sample size (N = 85), the number of predictor variables (number of predictors = 17), the significance level (α = 0.05), and the null hypothesis (H0 ρ² = 0 as this is often chosen) and the alternative hypothesis (H1 ρ²) since both of these are needed to determine the effect size achieved by the regression. This last input parameter (that is, H1 ρ²) is calculated by G*Power by using the matrices containing the correlations of the predictors with the dependent variable and the correlations among predictors.

⁶ We would like to thank anonymous reviewers for highlighting this limitation in our study.

⁷ We thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this limitation to us.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Funded by Al-Muallem Mohammed Bin Ladin Chair for Creativity and Entrepreneurship and the Deanship of Scientific Research at Umm Al-Qura University, Saudi Arabia (DSR-UQU-BLIE-004).