Browsing by Subject "Entrepreneurial cognition"

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    The entrepreneur's social self and its impact on the entrepreneurial process
    (2021) Brändle, Leif; Kuckertz, Andreas
    Economic action is embedded into social systems. Prior research in entrepreneurship research has made substantial progress in delineating the impact of entrepreneurial activity on societal progress. The early agentic view on entrepreneurship relies on perceiving individual entrepreneurs as actors who shape their economic and social environments. However, entrepreneurs and their organizations are, at the same time, embedded in and driven by their social environments. Positions in social systems, in particular, might inform how individuals discover, evaluate, and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. This doctoral thesis aims to shed light on how individuals’ feelings of belonging and status in social environments influence key mechanisms in the entrepreneurial process. More specifically, the thesis builds and tests a theory on how the social class origins of individuals influence their beliefs in entrepreneurial feasibility and alter their entrepreneurial career intentions. Furthermore, it addresses how the perceived belonging to a social group—namely, the social identity of founders—influences the strategic orientations of new ventures and ultimately impacts the entrepreneurship outcomes for the organization, the community, and the society. By drawing on the extant literature and collecting new data, this thesis analyzes the interplay between individuals’ feelings of social belonging, their status, and the key mechanisms of the entrepreneurial process over the course of four quantitative studies. In building on the existing discussions about the compatibility of structural and agentic views, it develops a theoretical model of the entrepreneur’s social self, functioning as intermediary between social systems and an entrepreneur’s behavior. For instance, the first study of this dissertation asks how social class origins affect entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Based on a sample of 700 individuals that are largely representative of the German student population, the findings show that early social environments imprint cognitive tendencies toward entrepreneurship such as an individual’s perceived entrepreneurial self- efficacy. However, in line with the study’s hypotheses, individuals can alter these cognitive imprints through selecting and creating more favorable environments at later points in time. Specifically, education and perceptions of social mobility alter initial cognitive imprints toward individuals’ belief of adequately responding to relevant entrepreneurial tasks. Whereas the first study of this dissertation enhances the understanding of the role of individuals’ perceived positions in social systems over time on their perceived feasibility of the entrepreneurial process, the second study sheds light on how such perceptions of feasibility and social position affect entrepreneurial career entries. Based on a survey among 1,003 young adults in a critical career phase, the study’s findings indicate that social class origins influence how rather than if individuals intend to enter an entrepreneurial career. That is, the higher the individuals’ social class origins, the more likely their intention to combine paid employment with self-employment activities as entrepreneurial career path. While the first two studies highlight the role of positions in social systems for the entrepreneurial process, the remaining two studies in this dissertation turn toward how perceptions of belonging to social systems drive individual entrepreneurial cognition, firm-level strategic decision making and performance. Hence, one study asks how entrepreneurs’ social identities affect their entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Since social identities represent individual feelings of belonging to groups in social systems, the study hypothesizes how belonging to particular founder groups alters individuals’ beliefs in their entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Drawing on a survey among 753 nascent entrepreneurs, the study finds that feelings of belonging generally increase entrepreneurial self-efficacy beliefs. Furthermore, nascent entrepreneurs identifying with a group of self-oriented entrepreneurs (driven by economic self-interest) more likely experience entrepreneurial self-efficacy compared to those entrepreneurs identifying with a group of others-oriented entrepreneurs (driven by interests in communitarian and societal value generation). The final study of this dissertation takes up the difference between self- and other oriented founder identities in order to examine its impact on new ventures’ strategic decision making and performance. Based on a sample of 318 active founders, the study’s findings delineate how founders’ social identities influence the innovativeness, risk-taking and proactiveness of their newly found ventures. Furthermore, the findings indicate that these strategic orientations only partially succeed in translating founders’ social identities into performance. Whereas founder social identities that focus on creating value for others trigger more innovative ventures, self-oriented social identities are related to more risk-taking at an organizational level, which leads to higher performance outcomes at the enterprise, community, and societal levels. Overall, the results of this dissertation contribute to research on how individuals interpret their social environments and accordingly form decisions in the entrepreneurial process. Particularly, the findings speak to the emerging field of research on the interplay between social inequality and entrepreneurial organizations. However, this doctoral thesis can only be an intermediate step of understanding the inclusiveness of the entrepreneurial process. Hence, it formulates a call and outlines a future research agenda on how social status influences the ways in which individuals identify, evaluate, and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. This might lay the ground for further research on the role of the entrepreneur’s social self in the entrepreneurial process.