Resonant Leadership and Institutional Entrepreneurship: An Integrative Review and Framework with Implications for SMEs

Resonant leadership has been associated with creativity, knowledge sharing, trust, and innovative behavior, yet its relationship with institutional entrepreneurship remains underdeveloped. This integrative review synthesizes 46 journal publications, predominantly peer-reviewed articles, to examine how resonant leadership capabilities may contribute to institutional entrepreneurial action and to develop a framework with implications for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The review distinguishes direct resonant leadership evidence, adjacent mechanism research, and institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work studies. Mindfulness, hope, and compassion are treated as resonant-leadership renewal pathways, while social intelligence is positioned as a complementary relational capability. The synthesis suggests that these capabilities may support sensemaking, persistence, psychological safety, voice, coalition building, innovation, and proactiveness. Such behaviors may become institutionally consequential when combined with theorization, legitimacy construction, resource mobilization, and collective action directed at changing institutionalized arrangements. Power, field position, resistance, institutional complexity, and resource access condition this proposed process. The resulting framework identifies testable propositions and directions for longitudinal and multilevel research, particularly in resource-constrained SME settings.