GARY GORMAN IS AN ASSOCIATE DEAN AND associate professor and Dennis Hanlon an assistant professor at the Faculty of Business Administration, Memorial University ofNewfoundland, Canada, and Wayne King is director of the P. J. Gardiner Institute for Small Business Studies as well as an assistant professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. This paper reviews the literature in the areas of entrepreneurship education, enterprise education and education for small business management. The review covers the period from 1985 to 1994 inclusive and is limited to mainstream journals that focus on entrepreneurship and small business. Theoretical and empirical papers are examined from the perspective of content and market focus. The paper also suggests directions for future research.

This article makes two contributions to our understanding of the core entrepreneurial activity of assembling resources to pursue an opportunity. First, a conceptual framework is presented to organize the research on resource mobilization. Second, a study is presented based upon interviews with a random sample of 48 entrepreneurs to identify the supporters whom the entrepreneurs considered to have been key to their success and the resources obtained from these individuals. Results indicate that maximizing the overall effectiveness of resource combinations is a complex undertaking involving trade-offs between the quantity and quality of available resources and the efficiency versus effectiveness of supporters.

The entrepreneurship literature lacks a systematically developed and validated framework to ground educational programs. We previously developed behavioral observation scales (BOS) consisting of 9 dimensions and 47 behaviors. In this study, we validated the BOS using 12 performance measures and a national survey of 149 entrepreneurs. The BOS were found to be valid. All 9 BOS dimensions, as well as the total score on the BOS, correlated significantly with many of the 12 nonbehavioral performance measures. These BOS provide entrepreneurship education and educators with a validated and systematically developed instrument that can be used to appropriately ground education programs.

We tested the ability of task conflict to improve the quality of decisions made by four-person groups. In a choice between two entrepreneurial investments, conflict was created by endowing group members with a preference for either one investment or the other. Because the decision was subjective, decision quality was necessarily judged by a process criterion, the reduction in the biased evaluation of new information to support the leading alternative. Groups in which conflict was installed exhibited less bias than individuals, who themselves exhibited less bias than groups without such conflict. Regardless of whether conflict was installed, groups that reached an early consensus exhibited the greatest information bias, while groups that experienced sustained conflict exhibited the least. Before achieving consensus, information bias was not significantly different from zero, but then rose steadily after that agreement. This result identifies one specific mechanism by which conflict can improve the process of group decisions.

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