Fostering Change-Oriented Behaviors: A Broaden-and-Build Model

Psychological Resilience and Its Downstream Effects for Business Survival in Nascent Entrepreneurship

“…Put differently, our research encourages scholars to avoid focusing only on financial and social resources, instead suggesting that we need to look at personal psychological resources and how they engender entrepreneurial cognition and action. The broaden-and-build process describes the core tenets of how thought-action repertoires are expanded when individuals experience positive emotions (Frederickson & Levenson, 1998; Garland et al., 2010; Lin, Kao, Chen, & Lu, 2016; Tugade et al., 2004), but this research is just the beginning. For example, the cognitive broadening process of positivity could be used to explore the ways in which entrepreneurs perceive, appraise, and pursue new opportunities in the broader industry, especially in light of evidence that cognitive broadening is associated with improved creative problem solving (Isen, 1993, 1999).…”

“…More specifically, positive emotions are theorized to broaden individuals' awareness such that they are better able to flexibly and efficiently draw on higher and more open-minded levels of perceptions (e.g., Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998; Tugade et al., 2004). By broadening ones' cognitive perspective, individuals' arsenal of coping strategies are expanded whereby they become in a better position to behave in more adaptive and proactive ways; these behaviors in turn build resources for their coping abilities in the long run (e.g., Garland et al., 2010; Lin, Kao, Chen, & Lu, 2016). In contrast, negative emotions narrow individuals' attention to specific, short-term and oftentimes automatic action tendencies (e.g., attack, escape), which lead to less constructive coping behaviors (Fredrickson, 1998; Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004).…”

“…For example, the cognitive broadening process of positivity could be used to explore the ways in which entrepreneurs perceive, appraise, and pursue new opportunities in the broader industry, especially in light of evidence that cognitive broadening is associated with improved creative problem solving (Isen, 1993(Isen, , 1999. In addition, the core tenet of positivity increasing broadened behavioral repertoires could be used to examine how positive entrepreneurs proactively explore new opportunities through increased change-oriented behaviors (Lin et al, 2016;Shin, Taylor, & Seo, 2012), rather than merely focusing on perfecting their established business strategy. It is possible that the broaden-and-build theoretical process can help to explain the ways in which entrepreneurs seek out and make sense of new opportunities, and when this is most likely to happen, consistent with the goals of entrepreneurial cognition (e.g., Mitchell et al, 2002).…”

How does the social context fuel the proactive fire? A multilevel review and theoretical synthesis

“…For example, Burris, Detert, and Chiaburu (2008) found that low LMX made employees psychologically detach from their organizations ("reason to"), thus performing less voice behavior. On the basis of broadenand-build theory (Fredrickson, 2001), Lin, Kao, Chen, and Lu (2016) found that LMX influenced taking charge through positive affect ("energized to"). Yuan and Woodman (2010) theorized that LMX influences individual innovative behavior through expected image and performance gain ("can do").…”

Linking positive affect and motivation to transfer within training: a multilevel study

“…Second, we showed that the broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 1998(Fredrickson, , 2001(Fredrickson, , 2013 can be applied to transfer research. So far, it has been applied to many context including occupational health psychology (Algoe & Fredrickson, 2011;Schaufeli et al, 2009), organizational change (Avey et al, 2008;Lin et al, 2016) and organizational innovation (e.g. Amabile et al, 2005;Homklin et al, 2014), but not training transfer research.…”