The frugal entrepreneur: A self-regulatory perspective of resourceful entrepreneurial behavior

The present research complements extant perspectives of resourcefulness, which assert that resourceful behaviors arise out of responses to environmental constraints, by developing a model illustrating that entrepreneurs self-impose constraints on resource acquisition and deployment for differing reasons. Specifically, we introduce a novel conceptualization of frugality and differentiate it from self-control to develop a set of hypotheses that frugality predicts resource use behaviors based on long-held preferences (e.g., effectuation and bricolage) and self-control predicts resource use behaviors based on known end states or goals (e.g., causation and pre-commitments). After accumulating evidence of reliability and validity for a new measure of frugality contextualized for entrepreneurship research, the results support our self-regulatory theoretical framework. Our study contributes to research on resourcefulness by making multiple theoretical insights, and we outline numerous future research opportunities for applying the construct of frugality to explain entrepreneurial behavior.