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Previous research examining the link between individuals’ preferences for competition and occupational choice has not taken explicitly into account how the level of competition in various occupations is perceived by individuals. In contrast, we argue that individuals’ perception of intensity of competition is of key importance for linking theoretically and empirically individual competitiveness to occupational choice, particularly entrepreneurial entry. Using two datasets, one obtained from a student sample and the other from a general population sample, we provide empirical evidence that the relationship between individual competitiveness and occupational choice is moderated by perceived intensity of competition. Moreover, entrepreneurship is, on average, perceived as more competitively intense than paid employment in both samples implying that individuals shying away from competition and at the same time perceive particularly entrepreneurship as competitively intense are more likely to select into paid employment than into entrepreneurship.
Theoretischer Hintergrund: Hoffnung wirkt als motivationaler Mechanismus auf Handlungsintentionen in Krisensituationen und Situationen unter Unsicherheit (Krafft & Walker, 2018). Obwohl sich Hoffnung in den vergangenen Jahren als wichtige psychologische Ressource für persönliche Leistung und Zielerreichung in der Forschung etabliert hat, gibt es wenige Studien zum Einfluss auf berufsbezogene Entscheidungen. Diese zeigen jedoch Beziehungen zu wichtigen berufsbezogenen Variablen wie Jobzufriedenheit und Jobwechselabsicht (Reichard et al., 2013).
Fragestellung/Hypothesen: Über bekannte Effekte hinaus untersucht diese Studie den Einfluss von dispositioneller Hoffnung auf Jobwechseldynamiken. Wir betrachten Hoffnung als kontextunspezifischen, mehrdimensionalen Faktor, bestehend aus internaler selbstbezogener Hoffnung (Snyder, 2002) und ex ternaler Hoffnung auf einflussreiche Dritte sowie Zufall oder Schicksal (Bernardo, 2010). Wir hypothetisieren, dass insbesondere internale Hoffnung Jobwechselprozesse beeinflusst und den negativen Zusammenhang von Jobzufriedenheit und Jobwechselabsicht verstärkend moderiert.
Methodik/Ergebnisse: Die Hypothesen werden mittels Regressionsanalysen an einer Stichprobe von N=826 Berufstätigen geprüft. Internale Hoffnung korreliert negativ mit aktuellen Jobwechselabsichten, unter Kontrolle für Jobzufriedenheit wird dieser Zusammenhang positiv. Wir bestätigen den verstärkenden Effekt internaler Hoffnung auf den negativen Zusammenhang von Jobzufriedenheit und Jobwechselabsicht. Die Effekte sind robust, wenn für dispositionellen Optimismus als Alternativerklärung kontrolliert wird. Internale Hoffnung ist zudem positiv mit früheren Jobwechseln sowie aktueller Jobzufriedenheit assoziiert.
Diskussion/Implikationen: Unsere Studie leistet einen Beitrag zur Hoffnungsforschung im betrieblichen Kontext und belegt den Einfluss von Hoffnung auf Jobwechselprozesse. Eine divergente Wirkung von Hoffnung wird durch die Verstärkung von Jobwechselabsichten unter Jobunzufriedenheit gezeigt, bei gleichzeitiger Assoziation mit Jobzufriedenheit. Hoffnung sollte als personalpsychologischer Wirkmechanismus stärker in den Mittelpunkt innerbetrieblicher Maßnahmen gerückt werden, um diesen gezielt im Personalmanagement einzusetzen.
Research on entrepreneurs combining their own start-ups with wage work—often referred to as hybrid or part-time entrepreneurship—has primarily focused on employees (temporarily) retaining their wage jobs while (gradually) transitioning into entrepreneurship. During crises, however, entrepreneurs seeking to ensure survival of their existing ventures may strive to supplement self-employment with entry into wage jobs. Specifically, we hypothesize that such crisis-coping may facilitate venture survival through two separate pathways, an income-portfolio-driven one and one geared towards business model testing. The latter effect is contingent upon the degree of uncertainty regarding the business model change. We test these hypotheses empirically against the backdrop of the Covid-19 crisis using a sample of more than 10.000 German self-employed individuals. The results largely support our hypotheses and overall offer interesting implications for both future research as well as policymakers seeking to support small businesses during crisis periods.
While we have a great deal of scholarship on legitimacy, our understanding of how stigmatized actors seek to (re-)gain legitimacy remains quite limited. We seek to enhance our understanding of such processes through a qualitative, in-depth case study of a radical soccer fan community that, when faced an identity-threatening event, launched a crowdfunding campaign that ultimately succeeded in enhancing their legitimacy for their cause and enabling them to have a voice in a central strategic decision on the redesign of their club's soccer stadium. We leverage this case to develop a model on how stigmatized groups might be able to enhance their legitimacy in the eyes of certain audiences. We show that first, the crowdfunding campaign created a digital and temporal space allowing them to disassociate stigmatized and associate legitimate elements (i.e. artifact-based affiliation). Second, we theorize how various association tactics were drawn upon over time, facilitating an interrelated set of dynamics between what we label manual and forced association. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our study for future research on legitimation processes related to stigmatized groups.
Team start-ups have substantial advantages over solo start-ups, but teams often do not live up to their potential due to conflicts creating unfavorable team dynamics. Based on an experiment with 665 individuals in 133 randomly composed teams participating in a new-venture simulation, we found team members’ deep-level characteristics that trigger motivations to act, i.e., achievement motivation and leadership orientations, to be particularly important sources of task conflicts. We found that diversity in leadership orientation reduces conflicts because not all team members can lead at the same time. Unlike hypothesized, we found that diversity in achievement motivation also reduces conflicts, for which, ex-post, we explore potential reasons. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the mediating task and relationship conflicts differently affect team outcomes due to their different nature of task-relatedness: while task conflicts affect task-related team efficacy and may escalate into relationship conflicts, relationship conflicts directly affect team satisfaction, but not team efficacy. Further emphasizing the importance of a motivational basis of conflicts, we found that individuals’ general self-efficacy, a more belief-related construct, affects team outcomes only through team efficacy, but not via conflicts.
Referring to Isreal M. Kirzner (1973) and Schumpeter (1934), who emphasized the competitive nature of entrepreneurship, this study investigates whether potential and revealed entrepreneurs are more likely to seek competition than non-entrepreneurs. We provide a conceptual framework that links entrepreneurship to three facets of individual competitiveness drawn from economic, entrepreneurship, and psychological research: a desire to win, striving for personal development, and an enjoyment of competition. Following economic research linking competitive behavior in experiments to career choices, we conduct a lab-in-the-field study and demonstrate that entrepreneurs are more likely to enter competitions than non-entrepreneurs. Accounting for individual desires to win and mastery-related achievement motivations, our results indicate that entrepreneurs tend to enter competition for the sake of competition itself rather than for the prospect of winning it or personal development. Our results suggest that enjoyment of competition might be an additional factor driving entrepreneurs’ market entry decisions beyond well-known factors like overconfidence and risk-taking.
Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of using foreign languages on cooperative behavior in a prisoner’s dilemma setting. The cultural accommodation hypothesis suggests that people are less cooperative in English, associated with the Anglophone cultural cluster, than in French, which is – as is Belgium – associated with the more cooperative Latin European cultural cluster.
Design/methodology/approach: Choices are framed as pricing strategies in the context of duopolistic competition. In total, 422 Flemish-Belgium participants with English and French as foreign and Dutch as their native language played in one of three language treatments.
Findings: While the authors observe differences between the native and both foreign languages, which are moderated by gender, the authors do not find any difference in effects between the two foreign languages that are associated with different cultures. Extending cultural accommodation arguments, the data suggests an effect specific to the use of the two selected foreign languages.
Originality/value
The authors contribute to this literature by reporting an experimental test of cultural accommodation and alienation effects related to two foreign languages. The authors explore novel arguments, related to cognitive psychology and gender effects.
With increasing globalization comes an increasing number of people communicating in foreign languages when making strategic decisions. We develop a theoretical model in which comprehension constitutes an essential mediator for the effects of using a foreign language on cooperation in global business contexts. To resolve conceptual ambiguities, we separate information processing leading to comprehension from decision-making employing the previously comprehended information. For the first step, we demonstrate how using a foreign language can, depending on individuals’ foreign language proficiencies, trigger both lower and higher comprehension. Variation in comprehension is, as a second step and independent of its cause, negatively associated with individuals’ tendencies to cooperate. Our experimental results support our theorizing. This study provides new micro-foundations for strategic decision-making and discusses unreliable cooperation as a potentially destructive managerial group dynamic within foreign language contexts.
The ratio of index finger length to ring finger length (2D:4D) is considered to be a putative biomarker of prenatal androgen exposure (PAE), with previous research suggesting that 2D:4D is associated with human behaviors, especially sex-typical behaviors. This study empirically examines the relationship between 2D:4D and individual competitiveness, a behavioral trait that is found to be sexually dimorphic. We employ two related, but distinct, measures of competitiveness, namely behavioral measures obtained from economic experiments and psychometric self-reported measures. Our analyses are based on two independent data sets obtained from surveys and economic experiments with 461 visitors of a shopping mall (Study I) and 617 university students (Study II). The correlation between behavior in the economic experiment and digit ratios of both hands is not statistically significant in either study. In contrast, we find a negative and statistically significant relationship between psychometric self-reported measures of competitiveness and right hand digit ratios (R2D:4D) in both studies. This relationship is especially strong for younger people. Hence, this study provides some robust empirical evidence for a negative association between R2D:4D and self-reported competitiveness. We discuss potential reasons why digit ratio may relate differently to behaviors in specific economics experiments and to self-reported general competitiveness.
Innovating firms may acquire foreign knowledge and improve their innovation performance by offshoring their R&D activities to their own foreign affiliates (captive offshoring) as well as by contracting out their R&D to external foreign parties (contract offshoring). This study examines the impact of both R&D offshoring strategies on innovation performance. Based on a panel dataset of 2421 R&D-active firms in Germany, we demonstrate that captive offshoring and contract offshoring differ fundamentally in their impact on firm innovation performance. At low degrees of offshoring, contract offshoring positively affects innovation performance and is preferable over captive offshoring. At larger degrees of offshoring, captive offshoring becomes more beneficial while contract offshoring is disadvantageous. Both offshoring strategies eventually harm innovation performance when excessively employed. Furthermore, the R&D offshoring-performance relationship is leveraged by R&D intensity, such that firms with a larger knowledge stock benefit stronger from both captive and contract offshoring.
Economics meets psychology: Experimental and self-reported measures of individual competitiveness
(2017)
This study examines the relationship between economic and psychological approaches to measure individuals' competitiveness. While psychologists typically use self-reported psychometric scales, economists tend to use behavioral measures obtained from economic experiments, where subjects confronted with specific paid tasks have to select into either a competitive or a piece-rate payment scheme. Both measurement approaches have remained largely isolated from one another. We demonstrate that a standard behavioral measure and a psychometric scale of individual competitiveness are positively associated, but distinguishable with respect to the role of personal development motives. While self-reported competitiveness also emerges from personal development motives, the behavioral measure does not reflect such motives. The distinction between both measures is validated based on divergent associations with personality and interests in a competitive career.
Despite the high prevalence of hybrid entrepreneurs among multiple job holders, research on hybrid entrepreneurship and multiple job holding has largely evolved independently from each other. We take a first step for a fruitful exchange between both research streams by building on hybrid entrepreneurship theories to explain why multiple job holders frequently have higher hourly earnings in their second job compared to their main job. Consistent with these entrepreneurship theories, our empirical analysis, based on the British Household Panel Survey (1991–2008), demonstrates that engaging in self-employment as second job significantly increases the probability of having higher average earnings in this second job, compared to being paid employed in both occupations. Furthermore, we explore the roles of gender and household composition in explaining multiple job holders’ earnings structure.
We shed new light on the structure of the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and firm performance and how this relationship varies across contexts. Using commonality analysis, we decompose the variance in performance—in terms of the effects of innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk taking—into parts that are attributable to unique variations in these dimensions (unique effects) and those attributable to covariation between these dimensions (shared effects). By demonstrating the empirical relevance of unique, bilaterally shared, and commonly shared effects in a heterogeneous sample of low–tech, high–tech, and multi–sector firms, we consolidate existing conceptualizations of EO and propose an extension of the extant theoretical views of the construct.
We introduce “exploratory perseverance” as a novel construct that captures perseverant behavior in settings in which several alternatives can be explored and evaluated. We suggest that entrepreneurs display exploratory perseverance reflected by a tendency to keep exploring broader sets of alternatives, to adopt a parallel rather than sequential approach to trial‐and‐error learning, and, after negative experiences with some alternatives, to be more inclined to give them a second chance. The results from an experimental study of 449 individuals participating in the Iowa Gambling Task indicate that more entrepreneurially experienced individuals display greater exploratory perseverance than those with little to no entrepreneurial experience.
While previous studies demonstrated that, in many settings, women tend to be less willing than men to engage in interpersonal competition, this study focuses on selection into self-competition. Competing against own past performances can be an integral part of life, including job and sports. Using data obtained from a lab-in-the-field experiment, we find empirical evidence that women are, on average, more reluctant than men to compete against their own past performance. Our results suggest that this difference can be mainly explained by gender differences in risk preferences.
We examine how radical innovativeness affects how new ventures can establish legitimacy. While legitimacy research often assumes that new ventures similarly suffer from the liability of newness, radically innovative new ventures face stronger liabilities and are less successful when raising early-stage equity financing. Consequently, they may benefit more from identity-related, associative, and organizational legitimacy-building mechanisms, which mitigate the adverse effect and may turn radical innovativeness into an asset. Campaign-level observations for technology ventures and complementary individual-level experimental analyses of financial resource providers’ legitimacy assessments suggest that legitimation mechanisms are less effective for less radically innovative ventures and might even be counter-productive.
We draw on a variety of research areas that explain why individuals combine paid employment and self-employment. We provide a comprehensive empirical comparison of the relevance and co-occurrence of multiple motives. Our analysis shows that motives can be meaningfully distinguished according to whether a motive is endogenously transitory or not, and suggests the presence of three dominant classes of hybrid entrepreneurs. In particular, learning and growth constraints, which we refer to as transitory motives resolving over time, play a crucial role in distinguishing between the three classes. Based on an analysis of 3,868 hybrid and pure entrepreneurs, we show that our typology helps better understand the potentially heterogeneous relationships between being a hybrid entrepreneur and entrepreneurial performance and innovation behavior.
Among the new ventures actively seeking funds through equity crowdfunding, only a lucky few seemingly survive the rigorous selection process imposed by equity crowdfunding platforms (ECFPs). With a conjoint experiment involving decision-makers from 50 platforms in 22 countries, this study provides first quantitative evidence regarding how ECFPs actually use quality signals to select new ventures to start fundraising campaigns. The ECFPs interpret signals differently, depending on whether they impose a co-investment requirement or generate revenues from new ventures’ long-term performance. The effectiveness of the signals also is contingent on the applicant’s industry background and the signals’ accessibility in the country where the ECFP operates.
As innovation policy targets innovations suffering from underinvestment, we examine the effect of public grants on innovation. While innovation involves a lot of uncertainty, we suggest public grants as the best option bearing no obligations. But not all innovations are alike as they differ by newness level. Hence, we distinguish between ""new-to-world"" explorative and ""new-to-firm"" explotation innovation. Making use of (inter)national knowledge flow, some exploitative innovations are not ""new-to-firm"" but rather ""new-to-region or -country"" leveraging existing knowledge from another region or country. Allocating grants to the most promising startups, we evaluate startups' quality by high-tech industry and ""entrepreneurial orientation"" (EO). Within over 4,000 early-stage German startups, we find that explorative innovations benefit the most from grants, especially high EO startups. Also, grants help low EO firms to become innovative at all and to launch exploitative innovation with (inter)national knowledge flow.