Toward An Integration of the Behavioral and Cognitive Influences on the Entrepreneurship Process

Abstract

Research summary: Entrepreneurs develop innovations, fulfill customer needs, and spur economic growth by recognizing, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities. Despite progress, scholarly understanding of how entrepreneurs achieve these objectives may be incomplete. For instance, little explanation exists for why entrepreneurs may pursue activities seemingly at random, nor is there a clear endpoint to the entrepreneurship process. To address these concerns, we present a framework that integrates sensemaking and structuration perspectives to specify the cognitive and behavioral influences on the entrepreneurship process. Within this framework, entrepreneurs ultimately pursue opportunities through developing and deploying capabilities to create value for customers.Managerial summary: While entrepreneurs' initial insights regarding innovations and customer needs are important, these insights are only the beginning of an interactive, iterative path that ends with the formation of an organization that can reliably produce value for customers. One of entrepreneurs' most important tools along this path is their set of scripts. Scripts help define how entrepreneurs act and interact so they can fully understand market needs and develop the means for solving these needs. In this paper, our objective is to describe how these scripts help entrepreneurs do the hard work of thinking and acting to effectively create new venture capabilities and to explain how entrepreneurs, who may possess similar sets of scripts, may nevertheless conceptualize different opportunities and solutions. Strat. Entrepreneurship J., : 21-42 (2016) 10 1 As process-based perspectives, both sensemaking and structuration discuss individuals' activities. As noted, although both perspectives recognize the importance of cognitive and behavioral activities, sensemaking predominately emphasizes cognitive activities and structuration predominately emphasizes behavioral activities. For the sake of clarity, we discuss sensemaking 'activities' and structuration 'behaviors.'C. Pryor et al.

Self-regulation in entrepreneurs

“…Past research has demonstrated some differences in the effectiveness of self-regulatory strategies across different phases of the entrepreneurial process, and different levels of entrepreneurial experience. For example, Pryor, Webb, Ireland and Ketchen (2016) hypothesized that novice and experienced entrepreneurs would develop different behavioral scripts with regard to opportunity recognition, evaluation and exploitation.…”

Mind the gap: The role of gender in entrepreneurial career choice and social influence by founders

“…Workplace relationships can offer mentoring, shape preferences and allow employees to flourish (Colbert et al, 2016), and also legitimize opportunities identified through experience, observation, and communication (Nanda & Sørensen, 2010;Pryor et al, 2016). Employees' satisfaction, performance, retention, and mobility are found to be molded by others at work, most often hierarchical superiors with more authority, seniority, and experience (Abraham, 2017;Artz et al, 2017;Artz & Taengnoi, 2016;Lazear et al, 2015;McGinn & Milkman, 2013), sometimes perceived as role models (Gibson, 2004).…”

“…Finally, having access to mentoring from role models can have a particularly strong impact for individuals not yet exposed to (in)direct entrepreneurial career previews which could have changed their beliefs about or preferences for entrepreneurship (Greenberg, 2014;Lentz & Laband, 1990;Lyons & Zhang, 2018;Tonoyan et al, 2019). We expect the existence of such gaps to leave more room for role models to provide information and create awareness of the different phases involved in entrepreneurship (Pryor et al, 2016). We therefore hypothesize that:…”

“…We use startups as an empirical setting, where employer-employee (founder-joiner) interactions are likely to be direct and intense, possibly providing entrepreneurial career previews that can demystify the entrepreneurship process, update beliefs, and change preferences (Pryor et al, 2016;Sørensen & Fassiotto, 2011). Employers can steer the development of their employees by providing motivation, incentives, information, and knowledge (Artz, Goodall, & Oswald, 2017;Dezsö & Ross, 2012;Lazear, Shaw, & Stanton, 2015;Lyngsie & Foss, 2017).…”

The co-construction of entrepreneurial sensemaking

“…Mental models reflect individuals' cognitive frameworks that define plausibility, effectiveness, or some other form of acceptability (Pryor et al, 2015). In this study, we look at the emergence of market-oriented mental models which reflect sensemaking processes regarding problem solving for (superior) customer value creation.…”