Entrepreneurial Orientation and Financial Resources Availability as Determinants of Firms’ Growth

The purpose of this empirical paper is to investigate the determinants of firms’ growth during different financial cycles. In particular, we analyze the relationship between firms’ growth and their entrepreneurial orientation. In addition, we investigate how firms’ financial constraints moderate the relation between entrepreneurial orientation and growth before and during financial crisis. We test our hypotheses with an OLS regression model run on a sample of 382 European listed firms between 2003 and 2012. We found that entrepreneurial orientation is a determinant of firms’ growth and that during the period of crisis this relation is slightly exacerbated. Furthermore, we found that financial constraints only slightly attenuate the entrepreneurial orientation prediction of growth, which may mean that when firm is more financial constraint could be forced to increase its entrepreneurial orientation in order to maintain a higher growth rate.