The Relationship between Entrepreneurial Self‐Efficacy and Firm Performance: A Meta‐Analysis of Main and Moderator Effects*

We thank Professor Alan Carsrud, the Associate Editor, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback to improve this paper. We are also thankful to Professor David Dubofsky for his helpful comments.

Abstract

Entrepreneurial self‐efficacy (ESE) is an important construct in entrepreneurship research. It captures entrepreneurs’ specific self‐efficacy in accomplishing entrepreneurial tasks. Because various empirical results exist in past studies of the ESE‐firm performance relationship, we employed meta‐analysis to review and synthesize the current literature concerning this relationship and to address moderators that influence it. We meta‐analyzed 27 samples from 26 studies with a total sample size of 5,065 firms and found that the corrected ESE‐firm performance correlation is 0.309. We found that the firm performance measurement is a significant moderator and we suggest scholars to further identify moderators.

We thank Professor Alan Carsrud, the Associate Editor, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback to improve this paper. We are also thankful to Professor David Dubofsky for his helpful comments.

We thank Professor Alan Carsrud, the Associate Editor, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback to improve this paper. We are also thankful to Professor David Dubofsky for his helpful comments.

Notes

We thank Professor Alan Carsrud, the Associate Editor, and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback to improve this paper. We are also thankful to Professor David Dubofsky for his helpful comments.

8. For a review see Rauch and Frese (2007). GSE refers to an individual's confidence in any tasks and entrepreneurial outcomes (e.g., Markman, Balkin, and Baron 2003; Poon, Ainuddin, and Junit 2006).

9. Schneider, Ehrhart, and Macey (2011) indicated that early climate research was characterized by little focus and having a generic approach to climate. With respect to the bandwidth problem, they mentioned that “without a focus for the outcomes of interest, you need a very wide bandwidth to compensate for the lack of focus” (p. 379, Schneider, Ehrhart, and Macey 2011). They demonstrated that the “climate for what” or the “focused climate” or the “strategic climate” approach has substantially improved validity of the climate construct. Analogously, to improve the validity of self‐efficacy in the field of entrepreneurship, the construct of self‐efficacy should be contextualized to capture “self‐efficacy for what,” which can be entrepreneurial self‐efficacy.

10. We acknowledge that objective performance measure, such as archival data, might be biased because some firms may alter their financial statements to avoid taxation. However, primary studies did not mention this possible problem in their data, and we treat archival data as objective as previous research did.

11. Schmidt and Hunter (1999) mentioned that “failure to control for biases induced by measurement error has retarded the development of cumulative research knowledge” (p. 183). Thus, our interpretation of results was based on corrected effect sizes (i.e., $\widehat{\rho }$), corrected 95 percent confidence intervals, and corrected 80 percent creditability intervals rather than uncorrected counterparts.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chao Miao

Chao Miao is an Assistant Professor of Management at Wilkes University

Chao Miao and Shanshan Qian are first authors and equally contributed to this paper.

Shanshan Qian

Shanshan Qian is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Towson University

Dalong Ma

Dalong Ma is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at Missouri Western State University