ABSTRACT Tourism SMEs face growing pressure to contribute to sustainable development, yet many continue to struggle to achieve meaningful sustainability performance. This challenge is heightened by limited resources, organisational vulnerabilities and the rapid pace of digitalisation. Although responsible entrepreneurship has been recognised as a pathway to improved sustainability, the mechanisms through which it leads to better outcomes remain unclear. This study investigates how responsible entrepreneurship enhances sustainability performance by fostering organisational resilience, and how digital capabilities moderate this relationship. Drawing on the resource‐based view and dynamic capabilities perspective, survey data were collected in two waves from 410 Malaysian tourism SMEs and analysed using Partial Least Squares path modelling. The results reveal that responsible entrepreneurship positively influences organisational resilience, which in turn enhances sustainability performance. Notably, digital capabilities strengthen the positive link between responsible entrepreneurship and resilience. Furthermore, the cross‐validated predictive ability test (CVPAT) confirms strong model predictiveness, and tests for quadratic effects show no significant nonlinearity, supporting the robustness of the linear relationships. This study advances the understanding of SME sustainability by clarifying how and when responsible entrepreneurship contributes to sustainability performance and by offering practical recommendations for building resilient, digitally empowered tourism SMEs.
Ooi et al. (Sun,) studied this question.