Identity Construction of the Women Entrepreneurial Leaders in Crisis Context

The COVID-19 crisis, through its suddenness, scale and immediate consequences (lockdown, shops’ closure, traffic restrictions, health measures, etc.), was a significant, even traumatic event for many entrepreneurs. But for some, it also proved to be an incentive for the adoption of new leadership postures, and for professional and/or personal transformation. In this context, our research explores how crises contribute to identity construction of women entrepreneurs as entrepreneurial leaders, who are able to "engage and mobilize organizational actors towards the continuous search for opportunities, to generate the discipline to pursue these and constantly challenge them, to know how to adapt or renew (if necessary) their business model, to develop an entrepreneurial spirit likely to foster innovation, or to focus on the implementation of their entrepreneurial project (Bagheri and Harrison, 2020; Bagheri and Pihie, 2011; Cogliser and Brigham, 2004; McGrath and MacMillan, 2000)" (Pailot et al., 2022). By studying women identity construction as entrepreneurial leaders in a specific context of crisis, we build on and extend Radu-Lefevre (2021) perspective who points out the “centrality of context in constructing and enacting entrepreneurial identity”. Moreover, we use the lens proposed by Dubar (2004, 2022), through the interplay and articulation of two transactions placed in a relationship of permanent interaction: the biological transaction and the relational transaction. This approach allows us to better understand identity work as a field of tension between identity for oneself (individual self-concept or personal identity) and identity for others (relational and/or collective self-concept) (Alvesson, 2010; Alvesson et al., 2008. To carry out this research, we conducted interviews with fifteen experienced women entrepreneurs. We adopted an abductive approach and coded the collected material following the recommendations for thematic content coding (Gioia et al., 2013; Miles et al., 2014; Miles & Huberman, 1994). We paid particular attention to the terms used by these women entrepreneurs to describe their leadership and themselves. This focus enabled us to better grasp gendered dimensions of their representation of themselves as entrepreneurial leaders. Our results show the importance of crisis as a revealing moment of learning about themselves, and of engaging our women entrepreneurs in a process of reflexivity about their self-representation as entrepreneurial leaders. In front of turbulence, these women leaders share a common language: they describe themselves by mobilizing a classic and “masculine” image of leadership, that of the “ship's captain in a storm”. Finally, our results reveal how these women entrepreneurs built their legitimacy and won the support of their employees during crisis. Self-representation as a legitimate entrepreneurial leader in a crisis context enables them to envisage an entrepreneurial future (identity-for-self structured by the biographical transaction). But the realization of their entrepreneurial project during crisis depends, in particular, on their ability to gain recognition for their entrepreneurial skills from their stakeholders (identity-for-others, shaped by the relational transaction) and to implement new strategies in response to opportunities, at the risk of seeing their self-representation threatened (denial of recognition, risk of not having their claimed identity confirmed, and thus of “losing face”).