How Has the COVID-19 Crisis Transformed Entrepreneurs into Sustainable Leaders?

EntREsilience, a five-country longitudinal qualitative study, was launched in 2020 in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and the UK to understand how entrepreneurs manifested resilience in response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis events from March 2020 to February 2022. EntREsilience proposed a resilience-manifestation process model describing how entrepreneurs responded to the COVID-19 disruption, aided by external and internal enablers, adjusting their businesses to stabilise and even hunting for opportunities to grow their businesses. The present research adds to the findings of EntREsilience by analysing the strategies applied by entrepreneurs in their response to the crisis. This exploratory study focused on the entrepreneurs’ community interactions and studied the effects of these interactions on the response measures adopted by the entrepreneurs. The results describe how the awareness of their stakeholder challenges shaped the entrepreneurial response. Realising the importance of stakeholder well-being to the sustainability of their enterprise motivated the entrepreneurs to develop sustainability competencies towards their stakeholder challenges, innovating solutions for their mutual well-being. By extending the resilience-manifestation process model, this paper proposes a transformation model depicting the process of entrepreneurs transforming into sustainable leaders triggered by stakeholder challenge awareness and moderated by contextual factors.