THREE ESSAYS ON THE ROLE OF EMOTIONS  IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Edwin Setiawan Sanusi

This dissertation explores novel approaches to understanding the role of emotions on entrepreneurship through discussions contained in three essays. The first essay hypothesizes that emotional cultures influence perceptions and judgments that are precursors to entrepreneurial activity, and can thus account for additional cross-national variation beyond traditional economic indicators and commonly studied cultural values. The data used to reach this conclusion comes from 87 countries surveyed by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and Gallup World Poll over the past decade, and longitudinal multilevel modeling shows that people in countries with higher levels of positive emotions perceive more entrepreneurial opportunities, while higher levels of negative emotions are associated with greater levels of latent entrepreneurship. Failures and setbacks are common experiences for entrepreneurs and those in entrepreneurial careers. The second essay examines whether appraisals following failure influence emotions, and whether these emotions, in turn, influence coping. Specifically, it examines appraisals, emotional responses, and coping among university faculty following an academic manuscript rejection, which is well represented as an entrepreneurial endeavor. Based on the cognitive appraisal approach, I predict that appraisals of rejection indirectly influence the use of active and avoidance coping through emotions. I tested the predictions using path analysis of data collected from a sample of 145 research faculty who were surveyed about their most recent manuscript rejection. I found that perceived fairness, perceived effort, career risk, and journal prestige influenced active and avoidance coping through the experience of outward harm, inward harm/threat, and challenge emotions. That most entrepreneurs experience significant grief when their businesses fail is widely acknowledged, but to date, entrepreneurship scholars have treated this grief as something to be minimized or overcome. The third essay develops an emotion theory-derived framework that shows how emotions such as sadness and anger can be adaptive; specific negative emotions drive a set of concomitant responses—physiological, behavioral, experiential, appraisal, and action readiness—that can enable an entrepreneur to address the costs of failure quickly. The essay also discusses how grief-related emotions guide the sensemaking process, which is crucial to the recovery of an entrepreneurial self-identity.

THREE ESSAYS ON THE ROLE OF EMOTIONS IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP

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