Entrepreneurial Behaviour

Unveiling the Cognitive and Emotional Aspects of Entrepreneurship

Andrea Caputo, Massimiliano M. Pellegrini

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789735086
• eBook ISBN: 9781789735093
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Entrepreneurial Behaviour: Unveiling the Cognitive and Emotional Aspects of Entrepreneurship provides a range of scholarly explorations of how decisions permeate the success of entrepreneurial ventures throughout their life cycle. This bridges the gaps in current research on entrepreneurship and innovative behaviours with decision making and negotiation. The success, longevity, and survival of SMEs are deeply linked to the effectiveness of individual decision-making processes, and established firms need to develop an entrepreneurial decision-making processes to maintain competitive advantages in a continuously changing and increasingly turbulent environment. 

The book leads off with the core themes of the series and incorporates new perspectives around entrepreneurial emotions, passion and trust. Previous research has not studied in sufficient detail the negotiation processes in entrepreneurship. This edited work explores these negotiation processes in depth, while also providing a discussion forum for scholars interested in researching and understanding how decisions permeate the life of entrepreneurial ventures during their life cycle. 

Chapter 1

Introduction to “The Entrepreneurial Behaviour: Unveiling the Cognitive and Emotional Aspect of Entrepreneurship”

Andrea Caputo and Massimiliano M. Pellegrini

Abstract

This chapter introduces the content of the book, presenting the key insights from the contributed chapters.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Decision-making; cognition; entrepreneurial decisions; entrepreneurial behaviour; entrepreneurial passion

This edited collection follows a previous volume, titled The Anatomy of Entrepreneurial Decisions (Caputo & Pellegrini, 2019), in providing a springboard for scholarly research interested in the investigation of the behaviors and decision-making processes of entrepreneurs. In particular, this edited collection fits into a wider research effort to foster the understanding of the nature and impact of decisions made in entrepreneurial contexts, and aims to contribute to answering the call for studies in this field by Shepherd, Williams & Patzelt (2015).

The book initially originated from an idea based on our joint research interests in entrepreneurship (e.g., Caputo, 2013, 2014; Caputo et al., 2016; Dabić et al., 2019; Mehtap, Pellegrini, Caputo, & Welsh, 2017; Rialti, Pellegrini, Caputo, & Dabic, 2017) that followed in the proposal of a standing track at the European Academy of Management Annual Conference, within the SIG of Entrepreneurship, titled “Entrepreneurial Decision Making and Behaviour,” which keeps attracting a large number of novel and cutting-edge research articles.

By opening the call for chapters to several audiences beyond the EURAM Conference, we were able to gather a large number of high-quality contributions from all over the world.

In the call for chapters of this edited book, we called for scholars to submit empirical, theoretical, and review papers, which try to bridge the literature on entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial and innovative behaviors with decision-making and negotiation.

In particular, we originally proposed three particular broad areas that deserve research attention:

1. Entrepreneurial Emotions, Passion and Trust
2. Entrepreneurial Cognition and Decision-making processes
3. Entrepreneurship, Negotiation and Conflict Management

Every chapter that the reader will read in this book has undergone a thorough double-blind peer-review process. It started with authors submitting a chapter’s proposals in April 2019, which was reviewed and then authors were invited to submit a full chapter by July 2019. Chapters were then reviewed and finalized by the end of 2019.

We hope that this book offers the reader with contemporary and high-quality research investigating the anatomy of entrepreneurial decisions.

Structure of the Book

The book is composed of 16 contributed chapters from 41 scholars, where entrepreneurial behaviour, intended as both the behaviour of entrepreneurs, to-be entrepreneurs, or entrepreneurial ventures, is investigated through a variety of lenses.

Following this introductory chapter, in Chapter 2, titled “Evolving Differently from the Same Set of Pre-conditions: A Qualitative Longitudinal Study of Entrepreneurship and Genius Loci,” Pellegrini, Caputo, Ciappei and Dana present a qualitative longitudinal study that analyses how entrepreneurs of a same district, thus dealing with similar sets of resources and accesses to market, respond to innovation pressure. Interesting findings show that despite equal pre-conditions, firms evolve differently due to their approach to pursing opportunities, based on network configurations and cognitive interpretations of internal support for implementation.

In Chapter 3, titled “Entrepreneurship Education and Gamification: An Analysis of Students’ Learning Outcomes,” Bagheri, Alinezhad and Sajadi present a systematic literature review to examine 80 papers on the intersection between gamification and entrepreneurship education. Indeed, the study of gamification in managerial and entrepreneurial context is a new and important area of research (Silic, Marzi, Caputo, & Bal, 2020).

In Chapter 4, titled “Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy: How Do Displayed Entrepreneurs’ Personality Dark Traits Influence Crowdfunding Success?” Leonelli, Di Pietro and Masciarelli investigate how the crowdfunding campaigns reflect the personality traits of the entrepreneurs influencing the chances of a successssful fundraising. Focusing on three different entrepreneurs’ personality dark traits, narcissism, machiavellianism and psychopathy, the authors found an inverted U-shape relationship between entrepreneurs’ narcissism and the crowdfunding success. Entrepreneurs’ psychopathy has a negative linear relationship with crowdfunding success.

In Chapter 5, titled “Startups, Innovation and Performance: An Empirical Analysis in the Italian Context Using SMAA-S,” Nicotra, Romano, Castrogiovanni and Corrente investigates the impact of the Italian Growth Decree 2.0 in promoting the establishment and the growth of new innovative startups with a high technological value.

In Chapter 6, titled “The Target of Entrepreneurial Passion Under the Role of Passion Types and Culture: A Conceptual Framework,” Hizarci-Payne and Ozgen present a holistic perspective by investigating how passion types can have a role on entrepreneurs’ target of passion with the integration of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Building upon a conceptual framework, the authors propose major propositions to provide a comprehensive understanding of entrepreneurial passion and targets of passion.

In Chapter 7, titled “The Role of Entrepreneurial Stereotypes for Commercial and Social Startup Intentions,” Menke bridges different fields of research by combining theories on entrepreneurial intent, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Arguing that in situations of insufficient information individuals assess prospective careers in commercial and social entrepreneurship by means of stereotypes, the author explores the influence of commercial and social entrepreneurial stereotypes on an individual’s intention to start a commercial (for-profit) or social (not for-profit) venture.

In Chapter 8, titled “Uncovering the Role of Commitment in the Entrepreneurial Process: A Research Agenda,” Gabay-Mariani and Adam seek to advance ongoing research concerning entrepreneurial commitment. The work explores how the three-component model of commitment (TCM) could be specifically adapted for emerging organizations, drawing on its main evolutions and re-conceptualizations since the 1990s.

In Chapter 9, titled “Developing Creative Virtuosities for Entrepreneurship: Perspectives from Four Arts-based Metaphors” Karakas, Golgeci and Dibb use reflexive praxis to advance a framework for developing creative virtuosities for entrepreneurs based on four interrelated aspects: finding their own voice and passion at work; unleashing creativity and imagination at work; working collaboratively towards innovation; and handling complexity and integrative thinking. The chapter posits that the four virtuosities can provide entrepreneurs with a sound basis and a wealth of knowledge on developing creative solutions to new socioeconomic challenges of prospective radical technological and economic changes.

In Chapter 10, titled “The Role of Heuristics and Biases in Entrepreneurial Decision-making When Creativity Is a Necessity,” by Saleh and Hunt answer Shepherd et al. (2015) call for research into how entrepreneurs leverage heuristics and biases in decision-making and the benefits they gain as a result. The work explores how entrepreneurs introduce heuristics and biases at different stages of their decision-making process using a qualitative study of 21 new ventures. The results attest to entrepreneurs’ ingenuity and creativity in managing complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty.

In Chapter 11, titled “Re-visiting Effectuation: The Relationships with Causation, Entrepreneurial Experience, and Innovativeness,” Cha, Ruan and Frese study the four independent dimensions of effectuation and their relationships with causation. Studying 171 practising entrepreneurs, the authors found that they rely on causation as well as effectuation in their decision-making. In particular, the more experienced entrepreneurs are, the more they actually use causation; and entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture firm.

In Chapter 12, titled “ Evaluation of Decision Making in Family Business Mixing Data Based and Socioemotional Wealth Considerations,” Parra, Tort-Martorell, Alvarez-Gomez and Ruiz-Viñals expand their previous model “Circumplex Hierarchical Representation of Organisation Maturity Assessment” (CHROMA) to investigate decision-making processes of small and medium-sized family businesses. The work explores attributes that can be introduced into a new dimension in the CHROMA model in order to make it more specific in the analysis of DMPs of family businesses regardless of size.

In Chapter 13, titled “Cognitive Biases in the Venture Capitalist – Entrepreneur Dyad: The Role of Entrepreneurs’ Experience in VCs’ Investment Decisions,” Souakri answers the research question: how do the entrepreneurial experiences of both VCs and entrepreneurs interact and bias the evaluation? The author provides research-based information on the role human capital characteristics related to an entrepreneurial experience play in screening decisions and may act as a signal of quality of new ventures to VCs and then determine the follow-on stages of the assessment process.

In Chapter 14, titled “Why Senior Workers Becoming Entrepreneurs. Necessity or Passion?” Ortega-Lapiedra reflects on what leads the group of so-called senior entrepreneurs to start a new work-life based on entrepreneurship or self-employment, and to what extent we must consider firm performance as the variable on which the decision to undertake is pivoted.

In Chapter 15, titled “Gender and Performance: Preliminary Evidences from Italian Innovative SMEs,” Mari and Poggesi study the impact of gender on Italian innovative SMEs’ performance.

In Chapter 16, titled “A Micro-entrepreneur Network as a Community of Practice Boosting Entrepreneurial Activities,” Simunaniemi, Forsten-Astikainen, Hänninen and Muhos adopt a case study to describe practices in a micro-entrepreneur peer-to-peer network (MicroENTRE network), an example of a community of practice (CoP) where entrepreneurs, researchers and local public business advisory services (PBAS) seek to promote entrepreneurial behaviour through joint activities, such as sharing ideas, peer learning and business development.

In Chapter 17, titled “The Evaluative Nature of Entrepreneurial Constraints,” Lop...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1. Introduction to “The Entrepreneurial Behaviour: Unveiling the Cognitive and Emotional Aspect of Entrepreneurship”
• Chapter 2. Evolving Differently from the Same Set of Pre-conditions: A Qualitative Longitudinal Study of Entrepreneurship and Genius Loci
• Chapter 3. Entrepreneurship Education and Gamification: An Analysis of Students’ Learning Outcomes
• Chapter 4. Narcissism, Machiavellianism and Psychopathy: How Do Displayed Entrepreneurs’ Personality Dark Traits Influence Crowdfunding Success?
• Chapter 5. Startups, Innovation and Performance: An Empirical Analysis in the Italian Context Using SMAA-S
• Chapter 6. The Target of Entrepreneurial Passion Under the Role of Passion Types and Culture: A Conceptual Framework
• Chapter 7. The Role of Entrepreneurial Stereotypes for Commercial and Social Startup Intentions
• Chapter 8. Uncovering the Role of Commitment in the Entrepreneurial Process: A Research Agenda
• Chapter 9. Developing Creative Virtuosities for Entrepreneurship: Perspectives from Four Arts-based Metaphors
• Chapter 10. The Role of Heuristics and Biases in Entrepreneurial Decision-making When Creativity is a Necessity
• Chapter 11. Re-visiting Effectuation: The Relationships with Causation, Entrepreneurial Experience, and Innovativeness
• Chapter 12. Evaluation of Decision-making in Family Business Mixing Data Based and Socioemotional Wealth Considerations
• Chapter 13. Cognitive Biases in the Venture Capitalist – Entrepreneur Dyad: The Role of Entrepreneurs’ Experience in VCs’ Investment Decisions
• Chapter 14. Why Senior Workers Are Becoming Entrepreneurs: Necessity or Passion?
• Chapter 15. Gender and Performance: Preliminary Evidences from Italian Innovative SMEs
• Chapter 16. A Micro-entrepreneur Network as a Community of Practice Boosting Entrepreneurial Activities
• Chapter 17. The Evaluative Nature of Entrepreneurial Constraints
• Index