Exploring impulsivity within the entrepreneurial context

Abstract

Emerging evidence of a trait impulsivity-entrepreneurial action link has prompted reconsideration of the mainstream assumption that entrepreneurship is always a reasoned and rational endeavour. However, this research remains in its infancy and has yet to articulate mechanisms explaining the link from an unreasoned perspective and has yet to draw implications for a broader range of entrepreneurial outcomes. Without more extensive investigation of the impulsivity-entrepreneurship link, scholars remain unable to understand the true role of impulsivity and form solutions to augment its effects in entrepreneurship. The purpose of this thesis-by-publication is to fill this void by exploring various cognitive mechanisms as explanations, from an unreasoned perspective, for the effect of impulsivity on entrepreneurial behaviour, idea quality, and learning. Three distinct yet mutually informative papers are presented in this thesis-by-publication, each with its own explanatory model. Article 1 presents a model demonstrating that in contrast to the incumbent assumption that all entrepreneurial behaviour ought to be considered a rational undertaking, a material portion of entrepreneurial behaviour does, in fact, stem from a lack of reasoning. Paper 2 advances understanding of these less reasoned processes while illustrating the implications thereof for the quality of the idea pursued. Finally, Paper 3 further unpacks these less reasoned processes from the perspective of entrepreneurial learning. A variety of data sources were used, including prospective survey data among owner-managers (i.e., two waves; wave 1: n=807; wave 2: n=228), and a novel, multi-source experiment among Amazon Mechanical Turk participants (n=204) and independent expert idea raters (n=2). Using these data sources, the veracity of the theorised explanatory models were rigorously tested using a range of covariance-based and latent-moderated structural equation modelling techniques. In so doing, this research offers novel and useful insights into the impulsivity-entrepreneurship relationship by explaining–through a variety of mechanisms and conditional processes–the implications of impulsivity for entrepreneurial behaviour, idea quality, and learning. Overall, this thesis-by-publication advances theories of impulsivity, reasoning, and rationality in the entrepreneurial context while offering broader prescriptive implications, based on individuals’ impulsivity levels, for augmenting key entrepreneurial outcomes in both entrepreneurial and more traditional corporate contexts.