This paper aims to examine how psychological capital activates the absorptive-capacity pathway through which founders convert affective resources into knowledge engagement and, ultimately, into environmental entrepreneurial intention. The authors position entrepreneurial enrichment networks as the relational-knowledge infrastructure through which the four phases of absorptive capacity, acquisition, assimilation, transformation and exploitation, operate in service of green venture creation, and the authors also ask under what emotional conditions this knowledge engagement is sustained or constrained.
Drawing on affective events theory, conservation of resources theory and the absorptive-capacity perspective, the authors test a moderated serial-mediation model on survey data from 274 startup founders and co-founders in the USA and UK. Entrepreneurial zeal and entrepreneurial enrichment networks serve as sequential mediators linking psychological capital to environmental entrepreneurial intention, and cognitive-emotional strain is modelled as a moderator on the zeal-to-network path. The authors estimate the model in SmartPLS 4.
Psychological capital is positively associated with environmental entrepreneurial intention, with the effect transmitted serially through entrepreneurial zeal and entrepreneurial enrichment networks. Cognitive-emotional strain weakens the zeal-to-network linkage, indicating that strain disrupts the more cognitively demanding phases of knowledge assimilation and transformation through which networks generate strategic value. Even highly motivated founders engage their knowledge environment unevenly when emotional resources are depleted.
The study advances knowledge management research on environmental entrepreneurship by reframing psychological capital as the affective-motivational substrate that activates absorptive capacity, rather than as a substitute for it, and by specifying the four-phase knowledge mechanism through which networks crystallize intention. Repositioning cognitive-emotional strain as a boundary condition on knowledge engagement, the study integrates individual psychological states with network-level knowledge flows in high-autonomy entrepreneurial settings.
