Different Strokes for Different Folks: Entrepreneurial Narratives of Emotion, Cognition, and Making Sense of Business Failure

By Orla Byrne, Dean A. Shepherd. 2015

291 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This multiple case study of eight entrepreneurial narratives of failed businesses examines how narratives that express different emotional states (folks) reflect different efforts to make sense of failure experiences (strokes). Our comparisons of the narratives’ emotional content (describing emotional states at the time of business failure and presently) revealed some new insights. First, high negative emotions motivate making sense of a loss, while high positive emotions provide cognitive resources to facilitate and motivate making sense of the failure event. Second, emotion–focused coping helped deal with negative emotions. Finally, sensemaking was also facilitated by cognitive strategies that focused attention on the failure event and promoted self–reflection.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5306cd06a70bff871f70044a8936025a17dc5105

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Citations in the corpus

The Effects of Business Failure Experience on Successive Entrepreneurial Engagements: An Evolutionary Phase Model (2018, background): “…of scholarly research on the drivers and consequences of entrepreneurial business failure (Mantere, Aula, Schildt, & Vaara, 2013), with some contemporary entrepreneurship thinkers specifically calling for additional research on the topic (e.g., Byrne & Shepherd, 2015; Suddaby, Bruton, & Si, 2015).”
Mental disorders in the entrepreneurship context : When Being Different Can Be an Advantage (2018, background): “…as an expression of their identity or concept of self (Fauchart & Gruber, 2011), and persisting despite underperformance allows them to at least partly avoid the feelings of loss and negative emotions associated with exit (Byrne & Shepherd, 2015; Shepherd et al., 2016; Hessels et al., 2018).”
Entrepreneurial resilience and venture failure (2017, background): “A narrative design is appropriate for exploring phenomena for which data are rare or ‘sensitive’ (Byrne and Shepherd, 2015: 376).”
Entrepreneurship responding to adversity: Equilibrating Adverse Events and Disequilibrating Persistent Adversity (2020, background): “…and soldiers injured in combat (Haynie & Shepherd, 2011), abused women in Bangladesh (Shahriar & Shepherd, 2019), and individuals who have experienced business failure in Australia (Shepherd, 2003), the United Kingdom (Byrne & Shepherd, 2015), and the United States (Mueller & Shepherd, 2016).”
What is entrepreneurial failure? Implications for future research (2016, background): “For example, critical reflection, a key process in learning from experience, has been found to be important when learning from significant events (Cope, 2003) and failure (Byrne and Shepherd, 2013).”
The “heart” of entrepreneurship: The impact of entrepreneurial action on health and health on entrepreneurial action (2015, background): “Indeed, the risks and uncertainties associated with entrepreneurial action can cause fear and anxiety (Boyd and Gumpert, 1983), loneliness and social isolation (Akande, 1994), frustrations (Du Toit, 1980), and grief (Byrne and Shepherd, 2015).”
Teaching Entrepreneurship to University Students through Experiential Learning (2013, background): “A further advantage of experiential learning is that it can be designed to allow failure to occur – an important source of entrepreneurial learning (Cope, 2011) – but avoiding the financial and emotional costs of failing that would be encountered in the real world (Byrne and Shepherd, 2013).”