Contingent Impacts of Entrepreneurial Competencies and Proactive Sales Orientation on Organizational Improvisation and New Venture Performance Relationships: A Study Across Malaysian Ethnic Entrepreneurs

Organizational improvisation will enable organizations to respond flexibly and resiliently to unexpected environmental changes, while in contrast, Organizational improvisation enables organizations to react flexibly and resiliently to unexpected environmental changes, with its impact on venture performance dependent on supporting factors such as entrepreneurial competencies and a proactive sales orientation. Accordingly, this study seeks to determine the impact of organizational improvisation on new venture performance with entrepreneurial competencies and proactive sales orientation as moderators. The data were collected from 750 ethnic entrepreneurs operating in Malaysian retail small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through a quota sampling approach and analyzed using modeling techniques. The findings show organizational improvisation plays a critical role in performance of new ventures among Chinese, Malay and Indian owned retail SMEs in Malaysia. Moreover, a significant moderating role of entrepreneurial competencies was found for the organizational improvisation and new venture performance relationship among all samples of ethnic retail SMEs. However, to be a key moderator for only Chinese and Malay retail SMEs, but not for Indian retail SMEs. This implies that the level of resources (i.e., entrepreneurial competencies and proactive sales orientation) available to the organization also impacts new venture performance. Organizations with more resources at their disposal may be able to improvise more effectively and perform better than those with fewer resources. Therefore, entrepreneurs and managers need to consider these contingencies when developing strategies for new venture performance and organizational improvisation.