A Careers Perspective on Entrepreneurship

[Excerpt] What if being an entrepreneur were treated like any other occupation—teacher, nurse, manager? What if the decision to found a new venture were thought of as one of many options that individuals consider as they try to structure a meaningful and rewarding career? How would the field of entrepreneurship research be different? In our view, there is much to be learned by conceiving of entrepreneurship not solely as a final destination, but as a step along a career trajectory. Doing so opens the study of entrepreneurship to a wider range of scholarly insights, and promises important insights for entrepreneurial practice, training, and policy. This special issue takes an important step in this direction

Late stage value creation of founders: entrepreneur vs manager - why do some founder-ceos remain active in their venture-backed startups sfter three years, and how do they continue to create value

Entrepreneurship as a value-creating activity is vital for the economy, relying on the founder as a central force. Simultaneously, research shows that the value of a startup declines significantly if the founder stays beyond year three. I investigated why founders stay beyond the third year and how they create value during that time. To this end, I interviewed twelve founders and investors active in the startup ecosystem. I identified four different types of founders who stay in their company for different reasons, adding value by becoming managers or consciously taking on different roles remaining entrepreneurs and innovators

Past career in future thinking: How career management practices shape entrepreneurial decision-making

This study builds a grounded model of how careers shape entrepreneurs’ preference for causal and effectual decision logics when starting new ventures. Using both verbal protocol analysis and interviews, we adopt a qualitative research approach to induct career management practices germane to entrepreneurial decision making. Based on our empirical findings, we develop a model conceptualizing how configurations of career management practices, reflecting different emphases on career planning and career investment, are linked to entrepreneurial decision making through the imprint that they leave on one’s view of the future, generating a tendency toward predictive and/or creative control. These findings extend effectuation theorizing by reformulating one of its most pervasive assumptions and showing how careers produce distinct pathways to entrepreneurial thinking, even prior to entrepreneurial entry

Entrepreneurial demands and affect oscillation: the moderator effect of empowering leadership

Over the last decades, the nature of work and how individuals live their employee experience have been dramatically changing. New firms are rising, organizational cultures are shifting, and so the entrepreneurial context has become an interesting research scope for different academic areas. Considering the volatility and unpredictability of new-born technological business ventures, startup workers are considered to deal with unique job demands compared with regular employees. A need to be available 24/7, higher responsibilities and ability to deal with risk and uncertainty are challenging features that these employees – from founders to workers- must cope with in their daily lives. This setting converts the entrepreneurial context into an emotional roller coaster, where individuals can easily move from one core affective state to the other in the same temporal moment, triggered by events at the workplace. To maximize efficiency and save resources, these organizations are flattening hierarchies and expanding responsibilities to the employees. Empowering leadership assumes here a main role in how startup workers experience affectivity in this context. By conducting a study among 180 startup workers in Portugal, we found that in the presence of elevated levels of entrepreneurial demands, employees’ emotions at work tend to oscillate more. Leader’s behaviour is a key element for the presence of affect oscillation, since these demands were only related to affect oscillation when employees reported their leaders as having average or high levels of empowering leadership.Nas últimas décadas a natureza do trabalho e forma como os indivíduos vivem a experiência de ser colaborador tem mudado drasticamente. Novas empresas surgem, as culturas organizacionais transformam-se e o contexto de empreendedorismo tornou-se um âmbito de pesquisa interessante para diversas áreas académicas. Tendo em consideração a volatilidade e imprevisibilidade dos novos negócios tecnológicos, quem trabalha em "startups" lida com exigências de trabalho únicas, comparadas com funcionários de empresas normais. A necessidade de estar disponível 24/7, responsabilidades acrescidas e capacidade de lidar com o risco e incerteza são características desafiantes que estes trabalhadores - desde fundadores a colaboradores - têm de lidar no seu quotidiano. Este cenário torna o contexto empreendedor uma montanha-russa de emoções, onde os indivíduos conseguem facilmente passar de um estado afetivo para o outro no mesmo espaço temporal, devido aos eventos do ambiente de trabalho. Para maximizar eficiência e economizar recursos, estas empresas estão a tornar as suas estruturas hierárquicas mais planas e assim expandir responsabilidades pelos trabalhadores. A "empowering leadership" assume um papel fundamental na forma como os trabalhadores de "startups" experienciam a afetividade neste contexto. Através de um estudo realizado com 180 funcionários de startups em Portugal, descobrimos que na presença de elevados níveis de "entrepreneurial demands", as emoções dos funcionários tendem a oscilar mais. O comportamento dos líderes é um elemento-chave para a presença de oscilação emocional, dado que estas exigências estão apenas relacionadas com a oscilação do afeto quando os funcionários alegam que os seus líderes demonstram níveis médios ou altos de "empowering leadership"

Affordable or Premium Innovation The Influence of Individual and Contextual Factors on Innovators' Engagement in Different Innovation Types

Affordable innovations target customers with a low willingness or ability to pay. While researchers and practitioners increasingly recognise the importance of affordable innovation to society, we know little about the conditions under which individual innovators engage in affordable innovation rather than its counterpart: premium innovation. In our qualitative study of 55 innovators, we first uncover the individual and contextual factors that determine innovators' commitment to affordable and premium innovations. We also identify common combinations of factors that lead to different types of affordable and premium innovators. Finally, we highlight the conditions under which innovators move from affordable to premium innovations and from premium to affordable innovations. These results contribute to the innovation literature by showing that a conceptual distinction between affordable and premium innovations is necessary to understand individual innovative commitment and by explaining why innovators often choose premium innovations over socially relevant affordable innovations

Corporate social initiatives and employee retention

Firms are increasingly launching initiatives with explicit social mandates. The business case for these often relies on one critical aspect of human capital management: employee retention. Although prior empirical studies have demonstrated a link between corporate social initiatives and intermediate employee-related outcomes such as motivation and identification with the firm, their relationship with final retention outcomes has not been investigated. Our study fills this gap. Using individual-level data for approximately 10,000 employees in a global management consulting firm, we present empirical evidence of a positive retention effect associated with employee participation in a corporate initiative with explicit social impact goals. In addition, we offer arguments for moderating conditions that weaken this relationship and present evidence consistent with our arguments. Further econometric analysis based on a stringent matching approach as well as additional analyses based on survey and interview data suggest that the retention effect can at least partly be attributed to treatment and is not all just a manifestation of sorting of certain types of employees into the social initiative. Overall, by demonstrating a positive association between social initiative participation and employee retention, this study highlights the need for further research into how corporate social engagement can serve as a tool for strategic human capital management