ENTREPRENEURIAL SELF-EFFICACY AND FIRM PERFORMANCE IN CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENTS: EVIDENCE FROM THE FRANCHISE CONTEXT

The purpose of the current study is to investigate the impact of the five ESE dimensions on firm performance. More specifically, we examine whether any of the five ESE dimensions are important to firm performance when the external environment is either competitively intense or technologically turbulent. This study investigated these relationships using a sample of franchisees, an important audience understudied in entrepreneurial literature. We find that the three-way interaction of competitive intensity, technological turbulence and each of ESE innovation, ESE management, and ESE financial control predicts franchisee performance. This confirms the wisdom of studying ESE as consisting of specific dimensions (as opposed to holistically) because not all ESE dimensions interact with franchisee environment in predicting performance.