Failed firm founders’ grief coping during mentoring: Learning as the single catalyst of their restarting performance narratives

Abstract

Research suggests that mentoring is an appropriate entrepreneurship education method to support performance in growth-oriented start-up firms. Mentoring studies primarily consider the mentoring methods and materials that the mentors employ; however, the prior research has not yet analyzed which effects applied during mentoring benefit firm founders. In this study, we analyzed how a firm founder's grief coping effects (i.e., learning, exclusion, avoidance, and proactiveness) affected the likelihood that the person would restart the business after a failure. We offer two contributions, one to theory and one to managerial practice. The theoretical contribution is to establish that learning is a particular effect that predicts a failed firm founder's attempts to try again: a topic not directly covered earlier in either the entrepreneurship education or mentoring literature. The contribution to practice lies in illustrating the value of having a a mentor helping a firm founder to learn the lessons from a failed opportunity before starting work on a new opportunity.