The Microfoundations of Strategic Entrepreneurship: A Middle Management Perspective

Strategic entrepreneurship (SE) has attracted increased research attention, given its dual focus on creating competitive advantage and exploiting new opportunities. While research interest in SE has grown at a rapid pace in the past two decades, understanding of its microfoundations is limited. This conceptual paper contributes to the development of understating from a middle management perspective. It argues that middle managers’ five strategic roles serve as the microfoundations to firm’s SE. It also drills down to explore individual differences as antecedents in shaping these roles. This paper develops a research framework along with fine-grained propositions, aimed to shed light on future research and implications for practice.