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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.