Who Actually Innovates Sustainable Business Models? Employee Pro-Economic Behavior as a Microfoundation of Sustainable Business Model Innovation in SMEs

Research on sustainable business model innovation (SBMI) explains firm-level outcomes largely with firm-level constructs, leaving underexplored how employees contribute to business-model change. This question is especially important in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), where owner-managers often legitimate change and employees implement improvements through everyday work. This conceptual paper introduces employee pro-economic behavior: discretionary, observable employee conduct that supports the organization’s long-term economic viability through responsible resource use and work improvement while remaining consistent with its social and environmental commitments. The construct comprises two dimensions: resource efficiency behavior and improvement-oriented behavior. The framework separates behavioral activation from multilevel emergence. Resource-efficiency behaviors can accumulate until their effects become incorporated into the firm’s value logic, whereas improvement-oriented initiatives must progress through managerial recognition, evaluation, adoption, integration, and routinization. Resource constraints, external stakeholder proximity, and structural informality are theorized as double-edged conditions that facilitate one transition while constraining another. The framework clarifies when employee behavior remains operational improvement and when it acquires business-model-level consequences, and it offers testable propositions for research on employee microfoundations of SBMI in SMEs.