How Public Leaders Can Foster Their Entrepreneurial Behavior at Times of Uncertainty

Abstract

Under turbulence, like during the COVID-19 pandemic, public leaders need to be proactive, understand citizens’ needs, and deploy constrained resources at hand for the sake of the public. This submits that effectuation is an appropriate mode of entrepreneurial behavior, and, hence, uncertainty coping, in the public sector. However, recent research views public leaders’ behavior as still rather static. Thus, scholars request to investigate public entrepreneurship, calling for evidence on factors that empower public leaders to behave entrepreneurially. We draw upon creation theory of entrepreneurship to explore the influence of leader-induced organizational practices and individual abilities on public leaders’ effectual behavior. Thereby, we propose a moderated mediation model. Our analysis of 307 responses from public leaders reveals a significant mediation effect in that citizen involvement is positively related to public leaders’ effectual behavior via knowledge integration mechanisms. We further show that individual problem-mastery ability strengthens this indirect effect. In sum, we accelerate public entrepreneurship research by disentangling crucial ingredients of public leaders’ entrepreneurial behavior. We also advance entrepreneurship research, as we add novel antecedents to the nomological net of effectuation and introduce creation theory to a new domain, the public sector. Our results have implications for citizens and public leaders alike.