Andre van der Walt

Abstract

In successful attempts to increase entrepreneurial action across Africa, Frese and colleagues took a psychological approach. They incorporated personal initiative (PI) in action-based entrepreneurial interventions to support a bottom-up approach to entrepreneurial development. To build on these successes and increase the learning in these interventions, they must be made more generic and applied to a wider variety of settings and a more generalised population. The study, therefore, evaluated the inner workings of these interventions to identify nuances on an individual level to increase the learning that happens in these action-based interventions for developing economies. A multiple case study strategy was used to investigate two interventions in the Mopani region of South Africa consisting of female entrepreneurs. Qualitative data were collected and analysed inductively to make sense of the nuances in these interventions. Trustworthiness in the data was established by focusing on quality mechanisms before, during and after data collection and analysis. The findings resulted in three propositions to help extend the Action Regulation Theory (ART) by showing how individual mindsets play an active role in information seeking to impact the action sequence.