FG ABWL, insbesondere empirische Unternehmensforschung und Transformation
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More attention must be paid to the multidimensional nature of competitiveness to better understand how competitiveness relates to personality and gender. We focus on three dimensions: Desire to Win (DW), Personal Development competitiveness (PD), and Enjoyment of Competition (EC). Our empirical exploratory analysis is based on a large sample of 1520 individuals. We control for interdimensional correlations, correct for multiple testing, and use conservative thresholds to provide robust evidence on dimension-specific associations of competitiveness with personality, operationalized via the HEXACO framework, and gender. Independent of the respectively other competitiveness dimensions, DW relates to less honesty-humility and less agreeableness, PD to more emotionality, and EC to more extraversion and less emotionality. EC is the sole source of gender differences among the correlated competitiveness dimensions.
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.
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.
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.
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.