The Relationship between Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy and Firm Performance: A Meta-Analysis of Main and Moderator Effects

Entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) is an important construct in entrepreneurship research. It captures entrepreneurs' specific self-efficacy in accomplishing entrepreneurial tasks. Because various empirical results exist in past studies of the ESE-firm performance relationship, we employed meta-analysis to review and synthesize the current literature concerning this relationship and to address moderators that influence it. We meta-analyzed 27 samples from 26 studies with a total sample size of 5,065 firms and found that the corrected ESE-firm performance correlation is 0.309. We found that the firm performance measurement is a significant moderator and we suggest scholars to further identify moderators.