Entrepreneurial social identity and stakeholders: the socio-economic implications

Purpose - Entrepreneurial identity involves identifying and exploiting opportunities to create value and wealth. Entrepreneurship contributes mainly to a firm’s efforts be exploited in a marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the entrepreneurial social identities identified by Fauchart and Gruber (2011) and three primary stakeholders: investors, customers and employees. Design/methodology/approach - Data were collected through online questionnaires from entrepreneurs who had created their own new venture in Spain. The results were analysed using partial least squares technique (PLS-SEM) (Fornell and Cha, 1994) with Smart PLS 3.0 (Ringleet al., 2015). Findings - The results show that the identities defined as Darwinian and Communitarian have a positive effect on profits and growth in sales, which serve to create value for investors and customers. The effect is not significant, however, when these identities are connected to job creation to create value for employees. Further, the multi-group analysis performed shows that this relationship differs significantly based on gender. Research limitations/implications - The main limitation is that this research does not include relevant stakeholders like sponsors or project managers. The next step is to expand this research to this kind of stakeholders. Practical implications - The research assists gender entrepreneurial social identity and business performance under the impact on primary stakeholders. Social implications - This research has the potential to analyse the entrepreneurial social identities for their contribution to create value and wealth. Originality/value - The authors’ main contributions are to have based the study on the relationship between entrepreneurial social identity and business performance and their impact on primary stakeholders and to have analysed the differences on gender entrepreneurial social identity and business performance and their impact on primary stakeholders.