The relationships between social capital and organisational entrepreneurship at small and medium enterprises of Zanjan province

The purpose of this paper is to perform an empirical investigation on the impact of social capital (relational, structural and cognitive) on organisational entrepreneurship and the impact of organisational entrepreneurship on existence of opportunity, discovery of opportunity, decision to exploit opportunity, entrepreneurial strategy, resource acquisition and organising process. The statistical population of this study is SMEs' in Zanjan province. Seventy eight questionnaires with multiple choice questions were distributed among sample individuals. The research is based on structural equation model and partial least square method and Smart-PLS software were used for analysing the data in order to evaluate the relationship between variables and their impact on each other. Empirical results confirm that social capital has positive impact on organisational entrepreneurship. Among social capital dimensions, structural and relational capitals have positive impact on organisational entrepreneurship, but there is no positive relationship between cognitive dimension and organisational entrepreneurship. Clearly, organisational entrepreneurship process becomes stronger with the presence of social capital. The results of this study lead SMEs' managers to better understanding of these relations and improve their performance.