Yousif Riyadh Mahmood, Jasim Mohammed Kareem
The essence of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) has now been considered as a sustainable source of competitive advantage and especially in start - ups . These papers aims at to exploring how different factors influencing on developing employee’s citizenship behavior and effect the viability of new ventures . Additionally, it examines the mediating impact of stress in the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and OCB. Thi s paper adopted survey questionnaire to collect data from the employees working in newly established entrepreneurial ventures in Iraq by randomly distributing 5 92 questionnaires and received 359 completely answered questionnaires. The Partial Least Square S tructural Equation M odeling (PLS - SEM) was utilized to examine the direct and mediating effects. The results of data analysis reveal the negative significant effect of entrepreneurial leadership and stress on developing organizational citizenship behavior in entrepreneurial ventures in Iraq . The study has some useful aspects for the academic researchers to further explore the examined phenomenon in different contexts . The findings of this paper are also helpful for the entrepreneurs and policy makers espec ially for the SMEs sector in Iraq .