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Female entrepreneurs play an increasingly recognised role in countries' overall well-being by contributing to job creation, wealth, family income and innovation. This study identifies combinations of family support that enhance business performance most effectively.

This study employs a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), drawing on 184 technology business owners to identify the family support configurations most conducive to high business performance.

The results suggest that high levels of emotional and instrumental support are necessary for female technology entrepreneurs to achieve a high firm performance (FP) level when instrumental support at home (ISH) is lacking. As a comparison, male technology entrepreneurs can still achieve a high level of FP when emotional and instrumental support for the business (ISB) is low.

This research contributes to the body of knowledge on women's entrepreneurship in emerging economies, technology entrepreneurs in South Africa and family and business support systems. The authors add to the emerging literature on the potential downsides of family embeddedness by tying theory to the findings on how family embeddedness-related obligations arise when individuals depend on their family's financial support and how this reliance impedes the formation of entrepreneurial intentions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating effect of networking ties on the relationship between customer orientation and firm performance.

This study adopted a survey approach to collect data from 251 respondents in the Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality in the Free State province, South Africa. Scales for data collection were operationalised from prior studies. A hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine the moderating effect of networking ties on the relationship between customer orientation and firm performance.

The results showed that customer orientation had a significant positive association with firm performance, thus supporting the existing calls for examining the unique contributions of customer orientation to firm performance. Furthermore, this study hypothesised that business, political, and social network ties positively moderated this association. However, the results showed that only business and social network ties had a positive and significant moderating effect, with the influence of customer orientation on firm performance being more pronounced for firms with high as opposed to low business and social network ties. Nevertheless, all the three types of network ties showed a positive and significant direct relationship with firm performance, thus supporting the consolidated literature on the positive impact of network ties on firm performance.

The practical implications are twofold. First, it encourages business owners to develop a customer-oriented approach as a key strategic objective in their pursuit for optimal business performance. Second, business owners and managers should increasingly exploit their business and social network ties to accumulate vital resources for effectively exploiting their customer-oriented capabilities as a means to improve their performance.

Even though customer orientation is a valuable internal strategic capability, its benefit on firm performance might be limited in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) when the businesses are unable to respond quickly to customer needs. This is more common when the SME is faced with resource limitations required for exploiting the new market opportunities. However, this study showed that SMEs can mitigate this issue by depending on their business and social network ties for valuable resources to effectively exploit opportunities that emerge from identified customer needs.

Social media is widely regarded as a strategic resource to improve firm performance. However, there are mixed findings on how businesses can use social media for better performance. This study aims to propose and test a mechanism through which social media can influence firm performance.

A survey approach was used to collect data from 262 small businesses in South Africa. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM) to assess the hypothesised relationships.

The findings support the significant role of social media in fostering firm performance. It is observed that the use of social media influences firm performance through three key customer-centric constructs: the strength of customer–firm relationships, customer orientation and customer co-creation. Additionally, the relationship between the strength of customer–firm relationships and firm performance is moderated by customer co-creation.

The study provides new insights into the mechanism through which social media fosters firm performance. Due to a lack of universality in establishing the direct effect of social media use on firm performance, providing evidence of an indirect path becomes vital for advancing knowledge on social media use in business. As such, this study contributes to the literature on social media and entrepreneurship by demonstrating a novel mechanism through which social media influences firm performance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether personality traits play a significant role in understanding students’ self-perceived employability and test if the associations are influenced by the student’s job market appraisal. This is important as perceptions about one’s employability hold invaluable importance for students in uncertain job environments as they might need to form strategies to cope with unemployment until they find a job.

Data were collected from 296 using a questionnaire survey approach and analyzed using hierarchical regression to test the hypothesized associations.

The findings showed that agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience are positive and significantly associated with self-perceived employability. Also, job market appraisal played a momentous role in predicting self-perceived employability both directly and via interaction with conscientiousness and openness to experience.

The present study is valuable to different stakeholders such as educators, employers and students as it identifies the personality dispositions that should be encouraged among students while also indicating the need for fostering student’s reappraisal of uncertain job markets.

This study presents new evidence on the application of the appraisal theory by indicating the interaction between personality traits and cognitive appraisal. This advances the current theoretical understanding of the mechanism through which personality traits can best explain individual differences in self-perceived employability.

Entrepreneurship education at universities aims to create entrepreneurial thinking and spread the culture of entrepreneurial awareness, skills and attitudes to students to stimulate their entrepreneurship intentions as graduates. This study investigates the impact of entrepreneurship education on innovative start-up intention as well as the mediating role of entrepreneurial mind-sets of university students.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used for analysis with (n = 204) valid questionnaires collected from university students.

The main findings show that entrepreneurial mind-sets mediate the relationship between entrepreneurship education and innovative start-up intention.

This study contributes to the body of knowledge by its application in a higher educational institution and enriches the literature with new evidence that entrepreneurship education could enhance innovative start-up intention.