A Psychological Approach To Entrepreneurship

øWithin an entrepreneurial context, what a person thinks and feels and how they behave are hugely consequential. Entrepreneurs often work in scenarios of considerable time pressure, task complexity, uncertainty and high performance variance. This fasci

Towards a Psychology of Entrepreneurship examines a theory of entrepreneurship, its empirical base and its implications. First, it argues that a psychological approach is necessary to understand entrepreneurship. Second, it argues that any theory of entrepreneurship should use active actions as a starting point - entrepreneurship is the epitome of an active agent in the market, rather than a reactive agent. Third, it discusses an action regulation theory to better understand the psychology of entrepreneurship. Fourth, it provides examples how this theory can help to understand entrepreneurial success. Finally, it suggests intervention programs to help entrepreneurs to be successful at growing their organizations. Towards a Psychology of Entrepreneurship presents a descriptive definition of the entrepreneur. It also emphasize that entrepreneurship does not necessarily imply the start-up and growth of business organizations but is a more general phenomenon of starting social organizations and changing organizations. Thus, it also includes social entrepreneurs in its definition of the entrepreneur - thus, founders of social service organizations are considered part of the entrepreneurship landscape.

The psychological study of entrepreneurship is most interesting because small-scale entrepreneurs must work on numerous tasks, such as development, leadership and organization. This text examines predictors of success and entrepreneurial behaviour.

The Psychology of Entrepreneurship: New Perspectives is an update of the earlier landmark volume in the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Organizational Frontiers Series. This new book takes stock of the advances in the field of the psychology of entrepreneurship with all new chapters and presents the latest findings on traditional topics, such as cognition, motivation, affect, personality, and action. The Psychology of Entrepreneurship: New Perspectives compiles research of the most prolific scholars in the field to produce an overview of the most important psychological topics relevant to entrepreneurship. It includes novel insights into topics such as entrepreneurial cognition, intrapreneurship and innovation, leadership, entrepreneurial competencies, action theory, entrepreneurship training, and the process of entrepreneurship. Additionally, the updated volume presents new topics that have become more and more important in entrepreneurship research. These topics include affect, clinical psychology and disorders, biological correlates of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial teams, culture, identity, starting capital, failure and exit, contextual factors, age and demographic change, evidence-based entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs’ well-being. With a collection of authors comprising experts who have developed the field over the last decade, The Psychology of Entrepreneurship: New Perspectives is vital to all students, scholars, and instructors interested in staying abreast of the most current, novel research and insights into the psychology of entrepreneurship.

Only if they do the right thing at the right time will owners of small businesses succeed. Simple enough, but what are the factors in their psychological makeup that enable them to do it? Frese and his contributors have studied small businesses in four African countries from a psychological perspective—the first time this has been done—and report that it's the psychological aspects of their strategies, not just the strategies themselves, that contribute significantly to their success. They also prove that many of the stereotypes that seem to characterize the owners of microbusinesses are clearly incorrect. Executives, analysts, bankers, international entrepreneurs, and their academic colleagues will discover that many of the conclusions they have drawn from previous studies can not be generalized. Only by separating those that can be generalized from those that can not, can we get a true understanding of the small business entrepreneurial dynamic. Frese and his colleagues focus on South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Zambia to produce a clear overview of the research on microbusiness and entrepreneurship in developing countries. They find that psychological strategies are closely related to entrepreneurial success, but because conditions in these countries differ widely, the particulars of certain strategies and their effectiveness may also differ. They show that a number of ideas prevalent among professionals and entrepreneurship researchers in developing countries need to be challenged. Among them, that microenterprise owners who started their companies because they were unemployed do worse than those who started for other, more positive reasons. Also, that human capital (education) represents the most important set of variables to be considered for success (it isn't), or that employing family members decreases success (it doesn't). Well written and impeccably researched, the book is an essential contribution to corporate and academic libraries, as well as to the knowledge of individuals in business, psychology, entrepreneurial and regional studies, and related fields.

Entrepreneurship can, at times, seem like a veritable jungle where finding one's way can prove to be difficult. This book functions as a map locating the most important issues: those where an acceptable consensus already exists, and those that remain open to discussion. In so doing, we have presented the accounts of distinguished explorers in their own words.

This fascinating book aims to provide a deeper understanding of the decision-making processes of entrepreneurs. This is achieved via a comparison of entrepreneurial individuals with different levels of expertise in contexts with varying degrees of potential for entrepreneurial success. This multidisciplinary study is based on entrepreneurship theory and empirical research as well as cognitive psychology. The cognitive perspective provides a link between the entrepreneur and new business creation by focusing on an individual's cognitive behaviour rather than on their personality traits. The essential issues of gathering and application of knowledge and expertise are also addressed: one of the most important implications of the study is that successful entrepreneurial decision-making behaviour can actually be taught and learned. The book concludes, however, that the provision of optimal teaching methods of this decision-making behaviour is a stiff challenge faced by entrepreneurship education. Presenting a novel combination of cognitive psychology and entrepreneurship theory with important practical implications, this book will strongly appeal to those involved in the study of entrepreneurship and cognitive psychology, and business and management. Entrepreneurs themselves will also find much to interest them in this book.