Gravitating exogenous shocks to the next normal through entrepreneurial coopetive interactions: A PLS-SEM and fsQCA approach

Purpose: Entrepreneurship can be viewed as an individual or group pursuit of market opportunities irrespective of the context. But when an exogenous shock alters and permanently alters the known normal, entrepreneurs can do no more than cope with the immediate impact. Covid-19 changed the normal for every-one, and the current study aims to analyse how the pandemic changed the context and entrepreneurial perspective of business owners geographically located in different cultural environments. Various experiences impacted them as they tried to navigate and mitigate the effects of the crisis on the wider economy and their business. We seek to identify the probable relevant entrepreneurial configurations in which one or more combinations of antecedent conditions are needed to cause entrepreneurs to adapt their behavior in order to increase their coopetitive interactions further, to mitigate the effects of the crisis.Originality: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical study to address an entrepreneurial phenomenon using an integrative approach using PLS-SEM and fsQCA as separate prediction-oriented methods in order to validate the proposed conceptual model and to create a preliminary scaffolding for building the Theory of Unplanned Behavior in a crisis context.