Human agency stands as a foundational element of entrepreneurship, embodying individuals’ proactive ability to shape their destinies, innovate, and navigate the complexities of new venture creation and development. Rooted in social cognitive theory, this concept underscores the interactive interplay between personal characteristics, behaviors, and environmental influences in driving entrepreneurial endeavors. Within this framework, agentic personal characteristics, comprising both socially admired attributes (e.g., entrepreneurial self-efficacy, dispositional positive affect, grit, and locus of control) and socially deviant features (e.g., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) provide the motivational force and resilience needed to tackle entrepreneurial endeavors. These personal characteristics are associated with engagement in a range of agentic behaviors (e.g., improvisation, transformational leadership, learning, and personal initiative) that embody entrepreneurial action exhibited by business founders as they work to effectively shape and adapt their ventures. Situational factors (e.g., institutional forces, political barriers, and industry-specific dynamics), in turn, can positively or negatively impact the expression of agentic personal characteristics and behaviors. Thus, understanding human agency in entrepreneurship necessitates a holistic examination of the intertwined dynamics between personal characteristics, behaviors, and contextual factors. Despite significant strides in comprehending human agency in entrepreneurship, numerous avenues for exploration remain. These include investigating gender disparities in agentic versus communal orientations among entrepreneurs, the impacts of artificial intelligence on entrepreneurial agency, trajectories of entrepreneurial agency over time, strategies for fostering collective agency in new venture teams, and exploring the darker (or unproductive) aspects of entrepreneurial agency. Developing a deeper understanding of human agency in the realm of entrepreneurship not only enriches the comprehension of the new venture creation and development process but also lays the groundwork for crafting more impactful strategies, policies, interventions, and educational initiatives to cultivate and leverage the full potential of business founders and their ventures.
