A reconceptualization of fear of failure in entrepreneurship

By G. Cacciotti, James C. Hayton, J. Mitchell, A. Giazitzoglu. 2016

370 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fear of failure both inhibits and motivates entrepreneurial behavior and therefore represents a rich opportunity for better understanding entrepreneurial motivation. Although considerable attention has been given to the study of fear of failure in entrepreneurship, scholars in this field have investigated this construct from distinct disciplinary perspectives. These perspectives use definitions and measures of fear of failure that are potentially in conflict and are characterized by a static approach, thereby limiting the validity of existing findings about the relationship between fear of failure and entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to delineate more precisely the nature of fear of failure within the entrepreneurial setting. Using an exploratory and inductive qualitative research design, we frame this construct in terms of socially situated cognition by adopting an approach that captures a combination of cognition, affect and action as it relates to the challenging, uncertain, and risk-laden experience of entrepreneurship. In so doing, we provide a unified perspective of fear of failure in entrepreneurship in order to facilitate progress in understanding its impact on entrepreneurial action and outcomes.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Management of Technology and Innovation, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e0c43e387e1bd8fad92ca7a72e8f66b997e40df7

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Business risk management in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (2020, background): “Fear of the future is amongst the most important reasons why entrepreneurs do not engage in business (Cacciotti et al., 2016).”
Self-Compassion When Coping With Venture Obstacles: Loving-Kindness Meditation and Entrepreneurial Fear of Failure (2019, background): “The subscales of entrepreneurial fear of failure, based on Cacciotti et al. (2016), are fear deriving from (1) opportunity costs, (2) financial security, (3) personal ability, (4) the ability to fund the venture, (5) the potential of the idea, and (6) threat to social esteem.”
What Makes an Entrepreneurship Study Entrepreneurial? Toward A Unified Theory of Entrepreneurial Agency (2020, background): “More recently, this interest has manifested as research on the role of imaginativeness (Kier & McMullen, 2018; McMullen & Kier, 2017), fear (Cacciotti et al., 2016), or empathy (Bacq & Alt, 2018; McMullen, 2015) in entrepreneurship.”
Entrepreneurial fear of failure: Scale development and validation (2020, background): “That is, while anxiety and fear of failure specifically emerged as important themes within the qualitative interviews that we used to develop the initial pool of items herein (Cacciotti et al., 2016), our research can also be viewed as highlighting various aspects of the experience of entrepreneursh”