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In this study, we examine the link between new venture innovativeness and legitimacy. While legitimacy research often assumes that all new ventures suffer in the same way from the liability of newness, entrepreneurial ventures may differ substantially in their degree of innovativeness, introducing either highly new or relying on established technologies. We argue that radically innovative new ventures face severe liability of newness and therefore are less successful when raising early stage equity financing. Further, we argue that this negative effect should turn positive if the new ventures are able to showcase legitimacy. An observational and a complementary experimental study support our arguments. Surprisingly, for non-innovative or incremental innovative ventures establishing legitimacy seems to provide little gains.
Individual-level effects of foreign language use on decision making are often related to shifts between more intuitive/heuristic and more deliberate/rational decision making. Intuitive behavior is substantially influenced by socialization and context. Consistently, meta-studies on the relationships between the use of intuition and specific behaviors in cooperation dilemmas reveal cross-country variation, suggesting that how foreign language use affects decision making might as well be highly dependent on the specific country context. This creates challenges to single-country studies. We, therefore, replicate in Germany a single-country study conducted in the Netherlands. While Germany and the Netherlands are quite similar on general cultural criteria, a recent meta-study on the use of heuristics in cooperation dilemmas suggests important differences regarding default social heuristics. This study thus aims at testing whether the cooperation-reducing effect of using English as a foreign language as found for the Netherlands generalizes across other country/mother tongue settings, which potentially differ considerably in terms of default social heuristics. An empirical comparison between Germany and the Netherlands replicates related effects from different types of experiments and supports the basic mechanism that supposedly underlies foreign language effects–i.e. a tendency towards more reflective decision making, independent of any specific heuristics–, but also suggests significant differences in ultimate outcomes, presumably due to cross-country differences in social heuristics.
Referring to Isreal M. Kirzner (1973) and Joseph A. Schumpeter (1934), who emphasized the competitive nature of entrepreneurship, this study investigates whether entrepreneurs are more competitive 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 recent 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 a competition or personal development in competition. 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.
Extant literature has largely assumed that firms providing research services to other firms as an inventor-for-hire will do so at the expense of developing their own product innovations. Given this assumption, it is surprising that many firms provide research services to other firms without compromising their own flow of product innovations. In this study, we provide a systematic logic that connects the inventor-for-hire services that firms provide to others with the firms’ own product innovation performance. We hypothesize that opportunistic gains from providing contract research eventually enable firms to increase their product innovation performance. Furthermore, we suggest that this increase will be stronger for technology leaders and will be weaker for firms with a strong engagement in basic research. We test our hypotheses on a panel of 1,006 firms over 2005 to 2013 and find support for our hypotheses.
Connecting People and Knowledge: Knowledge Spillovers, Cognitive Biases, and Entrepreneurship
(2019)
Having served under David at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, the authors witnessed first hand as he worked to build up entrepreneurship as an academic discipline. While he was building this community in the field writ-large, he was also building a strong network of entrepreneurship scholars within the team itself. While reflecting upon the benefits of cognitive biases such as optimism for entrepreneurial knowledge spillovers and demonstrating context-dependency of the benefits and drawbacks of cognitive biases, the authors also connect this to how they have experienced David’s way of developing a research network.
Can radicals get a seat on the negotiation table? A Dynamic Perspective on Legitimation Processes
(2021)
The growing body of the cultural entrepreneurship literature seeks to understand how actors facing the liability of newness gain legitimacy in the eyes of resource holding audiences. However, less is known about how dynamics play out overtime when an actor with a lack of legitimacy seeks to regain it. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative, in-depth case study of a radical soccer fan community facing an identity-threatening political decision (i.e., relocating their fan zone within their stadium). Realizing that they lack a seat on the negotiation table and their traditional forms of protest bore no fruits, they launched a crowdfunding campaign to promote their cause (i.e., keeping the fan zone). The radicals successfully raised money and - even more important - convinced several national and international audiences, ultimately resulting in a legitimacy gain in the critical local political audience's eyes. This paper demonstrates how digital artifacts such as crowdfunding serve as a mechanism for dissociating with illegitimate elements while reconfiguring the links with the environment to gain legitimacy. Moreover, we demonstrate that actors with a lack of legitimacy first need to gain endorsements from other actors before turning to the actor holding the most critical resource.
Many entrepreneurs start their businesses while staying employed. Although such businesses are theorized to have positive and negative effects on employers’ businesses, employers’ perceptions and reactions to subordinates’ entrepreneurial side businesses are mostly unexplored. Based on a vignette study of 988 managers, we find that employers acknowledge both opportunities related to increased job performance and job attitudes as well as threats emerging from enterprising employees. Employers’ prior experiences with enterprising employees make them perceive positive consequences as more likely. Situational factors affect the outcome expectancies and moderate the relationships between these outcome expectancies and employer behavior. We discuss implications of our findings for fostering entrepreneurial mindsets in established organizations and for the emergence of entrepreneurship.
Emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) increasingly access foreign technology and knowledge by internationalizing their R&D activities. Since technological laggardness hinders efficient knowledge transfer, a successful catch-up with advanced-economy multinational enterprises
(AMNEs) requires EMNEs to transfer foreign knowledge across national boundaries more effectively. However, we lack a clear understanding of how EMNEs manage this knowledge transfer and integration and to what extent the employment and effectiveness of corresponding facilitation mechanisms may differ from AMNEs. Adopting a sender-recipient model and drawing on arguments from learning theory and transaction costs economics, we suggest that EMNEs benefit more from and, consequently, are more likely to engage in mechanisms to increase
recipient capabilities and sender motivation. In a comparative analysis of Chinese, Indian, German, and U.S. MNEs and focusing on frequent international exchange of R&D personnel regarding recipient capabilities and the governance of foreign R&D activities regarding sender motivation, we observe positive relationships with home-market innovation for EMNEs, but not for AMNEs. Moreover, we observe that EMNEs exploit this positive effect and are more likely to use these mechanisms when focusing on technology- than on market-seeking.
We examined firm-level and country-level antecedents of R&D internationalization strategies, focusing on differences between enterprises in emerging and advanced economies. Previous research often focuses on the relative importance of home-base-exploiting versus home-base-augmenting knowledge transfer strategies. We suggest that country-level and firm-level effects differ for the two strategies, and hence, we examined each strategy independently. Collecting data in China, India, the United States, and Germany, we demonstrated that firms' relative technological position as a firm-level characteristic can explain differences in home-base-exploiting strategies between emerging and advanced economies. In contrast, home-base-augmenting is more closely related to exploratory institutional environments, a country-level factor. Thus, either firm- or country-level antecedents can gain a dominant role, depending on the strategy implemented.
Existing research focuses on hope as a motivational driver for personal effort. We argue that hope can facilitate individuals’ decisions for and against effort, depending on specific conditions. Based on a vignette study with 350 subjects, we test this suggestion with a scenario where a person decides for or against an effortful training that experts consider appropriate for that person, presuming that one could hope for success based on training but also for success without training. We find that hope can leverage individuals’ decisions to engage in and avoid effortful behavior. Moreover, ambiguity in a behavioral outcome strengthens the effect of hope on the likelihood of choosing the corresponding behavior. Separating internal from a more general kind of hope, we find that hope for success by training is mainly driven by internal hope but hope without training relates less to internal hope. Carefully separating the effects of hope from the effects of optimism, our study highlights the relevance of hope beyond optimism.
Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs
(2023)
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
We examine how external endorsements help new ventures with varying degrees of innovativeness to attract funding. According to optimal distinctiveness theory, new ventures should be as different from competitors as legitimately possible. However, initial research suggests that new ventures can also buffer their legitimacy through external endorsements. We clarify that effects of such legitimacy buffers depend critically on an audience's unique legitimacy-distinctiveness relationship. Specifically, external endorsements lead to different predictions about shifts in optimal distinctiveness for return-seeking audiences compared to novelty-seeking audiences as relevant new venture funders. For return-seeking audiences, new ventures are perceived as less legitimate when they are non-innovative or radically innovative so that incrementally innovative new ventures are most attractive without endorsements. External endorsements can thus buffer the legitimacy of non-innovative and radically innovative new ventures, but they lead to different performance implications for a return-seeking audience. While non-innovative new ventures increase their attractiveness, only radically innovative new ventures can become optimally distinctive and outperform other distinctiveness configurations. In contrast, novelty-seeking audiences already have a higher tolerance for radically innovative new ventures, so the effects of external endorsements are less pronounced. Four empirical studies, using observational data and experiments in equity and reward-based crowdfunding, provide strong support for this theory and account for alternative explanations such as risk perceptions. In turn, we shed new light on the crucial, audience-specific function of external endorsements, namely, as a means to alter optimal distinctiveness levels.
Many entrepreneurs start their businesses while being employed. We analyze managers’ perceptions of and reactions to subordinates’ entrepreneurial side businesses. Expecting improved personal skills, higher innovativeness, higher efficiency, and a better employer image leads to more positive employer reactions. Previous experiences with enterprising employees make managers perceive such positive consequences as more likely. Expectations of employees using employer resources for own businesses, lower resilience and flexibility, and a lowered fit of employees with the employing organization lead to more discouraging behaviors. Situational factors such as employee importance and proximity of employee’s and employer’s businesses affect these outcome expectancies and moderate the relationships between outcome expectancies and employers’ behaviors.
Theoretischer Hintergrund: Dispositionale Hoffnung wirkt als motivationaler Mechanismus in unsicheren und krisenbehafteten Situationen, wie bei der Bewältigung beruflicher Herausforderungen und der Anpassung an das „New Normal“ der heutigen Arbeitswelt. Obwohl positive Zusammenhänge zwischen Hoffnung und Karriereplanung (Hirschi et al., 2017), beruflicher Identität (Diemer & Blustein, 2007) und beruflicher Anpassungsfähigkeit (Niles, 2011) berichtet werden, ist unklar, welchen Einfluss Hoffnung auf die Richtung einer Karriere nimmt.
Fragestellung/Hypothesen. Diese Studie untersucht den Zusammenhang von dispositionaler Hoffnung und fundamentalen Karrierezielen. Hoffnung wird als kontextunspezifisches, mehrdimensionales Konstrukt betrachtet (Bernardo, 2010), bestehend aus internaler (selbstbezogener) und externaler (auf externe Faktoren wie andere Menschen und Zufall bezogene) Hoffnung. Wir hypothetisieren, dass internale Hoffnung positiv auf die allgemeine Stärke von Karrieremotiven wirkt. Darüber hinaus werden verschiedene grundlegende Karrieremotive nach typischen Mustern des Zusammenhangs mit internaler und externaler Hoffnung unterschieden.
Methodik/Ergebnisse: Die Hypothesen wurden anhand einer Stichprobe von N=1201 Teilnehmenden geprüft. Die Mehrdimensionalität und entscheidungsleitende Wirkung der Karrieremotive werden durch mehrdimensionale Mehrebenen-Modelle abgebildet. Es zeigt sich, dass internale Hoffnung die generelle Stärke von Karrierezielen positiv beeinflusst und die Wahl herausfordernder Berufstätigkeiten fördert. Personen mit externaler Hoffnung auf andere streben nach Expertenstatus, Jobsicherheit und berücksichtigen soziale Faktoren im Beruf. Externale Hoffnung auf Zufall wirkt positiv auf das Streben nach Kreativität und unternehmerischer Selbstständigkeit. Die Effekte sind unabhängig von dispositionalem Optimismus.
Diskussion/Implikationen: Diese Studie trägt zur Hoffnungs- und Karriereforschung bei und unterstreicht die Bedeutung von Hoffnung im beruflichen Kontext. Hoffnung sollte demnach als mehrdimensionaler Einflussfaktor in Karriereentscheidungen sowie in Weiterbildungs- und Entwicklungsmaßnahmen verstärkt berücksichtigt werden.
Legitimizing non-innovative and radically innovative products and services on crowdfunding platforms
(2024)
Whether reward crowdfunding backers perceive a product or service as legitimate depends on many factors, including its innovativeness. However, studies offer conflicting results on how different levels of innovativeness influence perceived legitimacy. Some report that less innovative and only incrementally innovative products and services suffer from legitimacy challenges. Other research indicates that incrementally innovative products or services might be the most legitimate cases, at least as long as they are not receiving additional endorsements. Endorsements, such as strategic alliance partners, professional investors, or media coverage, may change whether or not lower levels of innovativeness threaten legitimacy in the eyes of the crowd. Using a vignette study approach with a sample of people experienced with crowdfunding investments, this study tests, first, how innovativeness affects legitimacy and, second, how external endorsements influence what level of innovativeness is most legitimate. The analyses reveal that without additional external endorsements, incrementally innovative products and services are most legitimate, while radically innovative ones just slightly outperform non-innovative ones. Results also reveal that threats to legitimacy posed by non-innovativeness and radical innovativeness can be buffered. However, not all three external endorsements display the same effects. Media coverage seems to help everyone, but it helps those who are already legitimate the most. The slightly negative effect of additional legitimacy through alliances and investors for incrementally innovative products is surprising but might be explained by redundant legitimacy.
The Behavioral Inhibition and Behavioral Approach Systems (BIS/BAS) have been conceptualized as fundamental motivational drivers deeply rooted in human neurophysiology. Recently, BIS/BAS have been linked to the emergence of entrepreneurship. This raises a question: Are BIS/BAS merely alternative reflections of underlying personality traits? Could their effects be similarly explained by a basic personality framework such as the Big Five or HEXACO, which have also been linked to neurobiological roots, or do they make a unique contribution to entrepreneurship research? Using regression and commonality analyses for a relatively large sample (N=790), this study shows that BIS/BAS influence entrepreneurial intentions beyond what is explained by the HEXACO model. This is true even when personality measures are used at the level of personality factors, facets, or even individual items. Notably, the four dimensions of BIS/BAS account for more variance than the six dimensions of personality traits. Thus, the BIS/BAS captures more than just general personality effects. Additionally, in a subsample (N=470), we examined the relationship between BIS/BAS and prior entrepreneurial involvement. While potentially subject to the threat of reverse causality, we also examine the relationship between BIS/BAS and past entrepreneurial involvement in a subsample (N=470). Although at a weaker level, we observe the same pattern. Moreover, our results suggest that the observed effects of personality on entrepreneurial intentions are largely mediated by associations with entrepreneurial self-efficacy, the belief in being able to start and run one's own business. In contrast, the influence of BIS/BAS is largely independent of self-efficacy. These findings suggest that BIS/BAS is more related to basic motivations and less related to cognitive efficacy beliefs than HEXACO. In light of these findings, future entrepreneurship research should consider incorporating the basic motivational constructs of BIS/BAS as a complementary perspective to basic personality traits.
In recent years, there has been increasing use of experimentally validated self-reported items to measure individuals' risk preferences, specifically risk aversion. While previous research supports their convergent validity, we argue that self-reported risk preference measures capture a broad spectrum of additional constructs involved in risky decision-making, notably including loss aversion as a potential confound. In broader applications, such as observational studies, associations with other constructs enhance a measurement's ability to predict risk-taking behaviors across diverse natural environments, often arising from the interplay of different constructs better captured by comprehensive self-reported measures than by narrower, construct-specific incentivized measures. Conversely, in focused tests where each construct has unique behavioral implications, using broad self-reported measures as a replacement for construct-specific incentivized measurements can result in significant endogeneity issues. By analyzing three samples from two independent studies, we demonstrate that even after accounting for incentivized risk preference measures that remove latent construct associations and focus on measurement-related confounds, self-reported risk preferences maintain a substantial association with incentivized loss aversion measures, indicating that the measurement captures a mixture of both risk and loss aversion. We also observe that the strength of associations depends on whether individuals interpret risk-taking as accepting higher variances or higher losses. Based on this finding, we propose a simple procedure that utilizes this individual heterogeneity in the confounding effect's strength to enhance the robustness of conclusions drawn from analyses of self-reported risk preference measures
Not my business! The role of organizational culture in supporting employees with side businesses
(2023)
Organizations can benefit from their employees doing entrepreneurial side hustles through, e.g., empowerment or innovativeness, but do employers, as the most critical stakeholder for hybrid entrepreneurs, perceive and positively react to entrepreneurial side hustles? Research on the active role of the parental organization in the emergence and operation of entrepreneurial side activities is currently missing. Drawing on a large dataset with 855 managers, we explore the heterogeneity of organizations in responding to such employees. We place the organizational culture of the employers in the spotlight and examine its impact on managerial perceptions and their behavior in this context. We show that organizational characteristics such as flexibility or an internal focus lead to positive expectations of side hustles and claim that recognition is a relevant prerequisite to exploit arising opportunities or mitigate threats effectively. We fur-thermore show that next to indirect effects through outcome expectations, cultural characteris-tics also drive behavioral responses directly. For instance, focusing on flexibility leads to sup-portive behavior, while a strong focus on internal or external factors of an organization impedes supportive organizational behavior. We contribute to research on the emerging phenomenon of side hustles and push theory by revealing employer characteristics that lead to a more or less conducive environment for this type of entrepreneurs.
Ambidexterity is a wide-established and popular construct that promises to combine two seemingly opposing strategic actions—exploration and exploitation—for higher firm performance. Nevertheless, the (apparently peaceful) coexistence of two different conceptions of ambidexterity hampers a unified theoretical and empirical understanding in the field. This study introduces a new conceptual framework to study ambidexterity and its effects on firm performance. We propose that firms need to overcome two distinct types of trade-off—a trade-off in effects and a trade-off in implementing exploration and exploitation. If firms manage to be ambidextrous in effects and ambidextrous in implementing, they will achieve what we consider a higher-order synergetic ambidexterity. In addition to our theoretical framework, we provide an empirical illustration based on a commonality analysis. Our findings demonstrate how (a) independent effects of exploration and exploitation, (b) interaction effects of exploration and exploitation (representing ambidexterity in effects), and (c) shared effects of exploration and exploitation (representing ambidexterity in implementing) separately and jointly contribute to higher firm performance. We find that the highest effect on firm performance can be observed when firms are both ambidextrous in effects and ambidextrous in implementing.
Entrepreneurs misdiagnosing their ventures’ innovativeness: The roles of causation and effectuation
(2023)
This text discusses the concept of misdiagnosis in entrepreneurial ventures, where managers' unrealistic optimism can lead to misaligned strategies and late pivots. The study explores the connection between misdiagnosis and decision logics (effectuation and causation) through motivated reasoning and beliefs. The researchers conducted a study with 266 ventures from innovative industries and measured misdiagnosis by comparing managers' judgments with external experts' assessments of venture innovativeness. The results show that causation logic positively influences misdiagnosis, but this effect is reduced when coupled with flexibility. The study highlights the importance of objective performance measures and suggests that motivated reasoning and beliefs explain the link between causation logic and misdiagnosis. Additionally, older and larger ventures with a prevalence of causation logic may experience more misdiagnosis and potential delays in innovation efforts. Flexibility is crucial for older ventures to remain innovative.
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.
While increasing globalization of the business world and rising numbers of people working in foreign language contexts are undoubted facts of modern work life, there are surprisingly few studies on individuals’ emotional reactions to working in a foreign language. Facilitating further research, we introduce a short scale for foreign language anxiety that is applicable in business and other professional contexts. Additionally, we investigate its relationship with gender and general personality traits. Our analysis of survey data from 320 adult bilinguals with Dutch as their mother tongue and English as foreign language demonstrates the reliability of the short scale. Furthermore, we find that females experience higher levels of FLA, but that this association is mediated by differences in personality. Our study contributes to the emerging literature on individuals’ (emotional) responses to using foreign languages in business contexts.
Hybrid entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs who are simultaneously working as paid employees. Although they constitute a systematic and large part of new firm creation, their possibly distinct responsiveness to public policy is not yet studied. Arguing for the need to consider hybrid entrepreneurs in public policy, we analyze the introduction of one-stop shops for faster and simplified firm registration in Mexico. We find that hybrid entrepreneurs are more responsive to changes in entry regulation than full-time entrepreneurs. While both the best and least educated people respond to the reform, the effect is most pronounced for highly educated hybrid entrepreneurs.
Come on and Take a Free Ride: Contributing to Public Goods in Native and Foreign Language Settings
(2016)
Business schools around the world must prepare their students for two realities: operating in an English-speaking business world and working in teams. As yet, there is limited understanding of how operating in a native or a foreign language impacts students’ propensity to free ride in group settings. Building on general dual process theory of higher cognition and using a unique dataset of 276 Dutch business school students, we find that students are more inclined to free ride in a foreign language setting than in a native language setting. A student’s conscientiousness attenuates this relationship such that this effect is stronger for students who are less conscientious, and weaker and almost absent for those who are more conscientious. After a student decides not to free ride but to positively contribute to the group, the specific level of contribution is not affected by foreign language. We discuss implications for practice, policy, theory, and future research.
This study examines the relationship between prenatal testosterone exposure (PTE) and selection into entrepreneurship. We argue that the relationship between PTE and entrepreneurial intent is positive and mediated by general and domain–specific risk–taking related to financial investment and professional career. Using the second–to–fourth digit ratio (2D:4D) as noninvasive retrospective marker for PTE, we identify two–step mediation effects of PTE on entrepreneurial intent through both general and domain–specific risk–taking. To account for possible socialization–based effects, we control for gender and parental self–employment. Applying ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses and structural equation models, we provide empirical evidence for a biological association between 2D:4D and entrepreneurial intent.
Although research on public service motivation (PSM) is vast, there is little evidence regarding the effects of PSM on observable behavior. This article contributes to the understanding of the behavioral implications of PSM by investigating whether PSM is associated with prosocial behavior. Moreover, it addresses whether and how the behavior of other group members influences this relationship. The article uses the experimental setting of the public goods game, run with a sample of 263 students, in combination with survey‐based PSM measures. A positive link is found between PSM and prosocial behavior. This relationship is moderated by the behavior of other group members: high‐PSM people act even more prosocially when the other members of the group show prosocial behavior as well, but they do not do so if the behavior of other group members is not prosocial.
For a sample of 1243 European companies, we analyse the link between firm type and foreign direct investment (FDI) locations. We find substantial empirical evidence that being a family firm does not only affect the overall propensity for FDI, but that this effect is also specific to target regions. Overall, family firms invest more than managerial-led firms, particularly in Europe and North America. Furthermore, the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China do not constitute a homogeneous attractiveness cluster for FDI.
There's no fox like an old fox: Dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation and venture closure
(2023)
Only a few scholars examined downsides of EO and suggest it may negatively affect survival. Previous research, which mainly focuses on mature companies, assumes that the relationship between EO and survival is constant. However, because firm characteristics and causal mechanisms change as young venture survive and grow into mature firms, the relationships between EO and survival could also change over time. We extend the EO literature by considering changing EO effects when venture grow into mature firms and by employing a multidimensional view on EO and identify isolating independent mechanisms for the influence of each dimension (i.e. innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking) on the survival of young ventures. While the nature of proactiveness on performance is rathe positive, risk-taking and innovativeness increases the variance of firm performance and thus the chances of failure. However, the latter can be separated according to whether the increase in variance occurs at a single point in time (risk-taking) or over time (innovation) and whether the survivors have more money or more innovations. For young firms, innovativeness and risk-taking inhibit survival, while proactiveness promotes it, so the dimensions have divergent effects. As a consequence of the attrition of young ventures, the associations of innovativeness and risk-taking reverse when they grow older. Our empirical analyses are based on panel data of 8,518 young firms.
We document the predictive relevance of the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and the behavioral approach system (BAS) in a novel domain of societal importance: entrepreneurship. Based on structural equation models, Study 1 (N = 320) reveals that BAS reward responsiveness (BAS-RR) has a negative and BAS fun seeking (BAS-FS) has a positive association with entrepreneurial intent. Similar results emerge for Study 2 (N = 470): BAS-RR is negatively and BAS drive (BAS-D) is positively related to entrepreneurial intent. Additionally, Study 2 includes entrepreneurial experience, which is negatively related with BAS-RR and positively with BAS-D. We do not find any significant relationship between the BIS and entrepreneurial intent or experience. Our results support the multidimensionality of the BAS, with the subscales being differently associated with both entrepreneurial intent and experience. Finally, by simultaneously including intent and experience, Study 2 makes a methodological contribution related to the validity of student samples when analyzing entrepreneurial intent.
Principal Topic: Hybrid entrepreneurs, individuals working in a paid job while simultaneously being self-employed (Folta et al. 2010), seem to receive increasing scholarly attention in entrepreneurship research. Since they tend to be more risk-averse and have less entrepreneurial experience than non-hybrid entrepreneurs (Folta et al. 2010; Raffiee & Feng, 2014), the general proposition in research remains to view hybrid entrepreneurs as a homogenous group who mainly use hybridity for testing before transitioning into full-time self-employment. However, we show that considering a broad diversity of motives to stay in a paid job will reveal heterogeneity among hybrid entrepreneurs. Furthermore, since different motives tend to be associated with varying performance outcomes (Deci & Ryan, 2000), we demonstrate that heterogeneity among hybrid entrepreneurs relates to differences in performance and innovativeness.
Method: We employed a start-up panel dataset (2013 – 2018) from the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research to evaluate practically relevant combinations of motives derived from theory to empirically identify natural clusters among hybrid entrepreneurs by estimating a latent class logit model. Secondly, we use panel regression analyses to test whether these three classes compared to full-time entrepreneurs differ concerning their financial and innovative performance measured in profit, sales, and innovativeness as separate dependent variables. Hereby, we control for demographics, experience, and industry.
Results and Implications: We were able to identify three dominant types among hybrid entrepreneurs: opportunists, transitioners, and networkers. Moreover, performance differences exist between these three classes as well as compared to full-time entrepreneurs. We observe that opportunists are associated with higher short-term profits than full-time entrepreneurs. At the same time, networkers and transitioners seem to engage in more innovative activities than opportunists and full-time entrepreneurs. We contribute to current research on potential mechanisms causing hybrid entrepreneurship, showing that hybrid entrepreneurs should not be considered a homogeneous group. Furthermore, we contribute to entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating that heterogeneity among hybrids exists when considering motives to remain in a paid job, which is associated with differences in performance and innovativeness.
This study relies on optimal distinctiveness theory to investigate how radically innovative ventures might attract funding. Conforming with existing norms can help new ventures gain legitimacy from resource providers, yet radically innovative ventures instead feature extreme distinctiveness. The results of three complementary empirical studies affirm that these radically innovative ventures suffer from reduced funding chances among equity crowdfunders. Contributing to optimal distinctiveness theory, the authors show that extremely distinctive ventures can shift to become optimally distinctive. Thus, radically innovative ventures can reverse the negative effect and avoid the downsides of non-conformity by leveraging external legitimacy sources, such as endorsements from alliance partners or professional investors. The optimal level of distinctiveness also varies by audience, such that radically innovative ventures’ extreme distinctiveness evokes more negative judgments among equity crowdfunders who expect returns than among reward crowdfunders who seek novelty. Surprisingly though, without external legitimacy sources, radical innovativeness is never favored, even by novelty-seeking audiences. This fresh evidence that radical innovativeness constitutes both a liability and an asset, contingent on new ventures’ external endorsements and audience expectations, points to important boundary conditions for optimal distinctiveness theory.