Founder Identity Research Articles

Exploring the relationship between hybrid founder social identities and entrepreneurs’ psychological resilience

ABSTRACT This study explores the link between entrepreneurs’ hybrid founder social identity and psychological resilience, applying social identity theory and broaden-and-build theory. Psychological resilience is crucial for entrepreneurial success, given the challenging environments in which entrepreneurs operate. Yet, research on individual-level antecedents of entrepreneurs’ psychological resilience is limited. Entrepreneurs today strive to address social and ecological issues without sacrificing financial gain, making hybrid identity types—combining “opportunistic” (Darwinian) and “altruistic” (Communitarian or Missionary) elements—increasingly relevant. Analyzing survey data from 886 entrepreneurs, we find that entrepreneurs with specific hybrid identities (Darwinian-Communitarian or Darwinian-Missionary combinations) exhibit greater psychological resilience. We attribute this to their expanded ability to draw meanings and experience positive emotions from diverse sources, providing them with a broader psychological foundation to rely on in challenging times. This work enhances our understanding of entrepreneurs’ antecedents of psychological resilience and offers insights into the complexities of hybrid founder identities.

Giving Journeys: The Role of Private Foundations

ABSTRACTThe giving journeys of individuals, relating to their life stories and life places, have been positioned in the literature as romanticized versions of self. This research adopts a theory of philanthropic identity narratives using a journey metaphor, and explores the role and journeys associated with establishing a giving structure in the form of a private foundation. Findings from interviews with managers and trustees of private philanthropic foundations undertaken in two phases, 7 years apart, show that establishing a foundation shifts the emphasis of a giving journey from being individual‐focused to philanthropy‐focused, facilitating a legacy of giving rather than self. This paper contributes to theoretical and practical understandings of philanthropic journeys by adding a foundation lens, highlighting the shift in emphasis between identity and action, where establishing a giving structure is less about an individual founder's identity and more about focused philanthropic activity, irrespective of what that particular focus may be.

Beyond the prototype: Unpacking the intersectional identity and image work of female minority founders in a startup context.

It is well documented that female minority founders (FMFs) face disadvantages in starting and scaling their ventures. However, the causes of these disadvantages-as well as how FMFs navigate these challenges-are less understood. Our article adopts an intersectionality lens, which allows us to focus on and examine the multiple intersecting dimensions of FMFs (such as gender, ethnicity, migrant status, and social class) and how they influence their entrepreneurial experiences. Drawing upon an inductive study of FMFs operating in Berlin, we build a theory on intersectional identity and image work in startup contexts. We found key structural barriers that serve to sustain inequality and continue to favor more prototypical founders. However, we also identified sources of penalties and privileges that exacerbate (or mitigate) inequality and result in founder image discrepancy. Our analysis demonstrates how founder image discrepancy can prompt FMFs to engage in a progression of intersectional identity and image work that shapes their founder identity. These findings advance entrepreneurship and identity research by extending our understanding of how intersectional identity challenges and opportunities manifest and can be managed within startup contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Darwinians and Idealists: Effects of Prior Professional and Personal Identities on Founder Identity

Darwinians and Idealists: Effects of Prior Professional and Personal Identities on Founder Identity

It’s Always Darkest Before Dawn: The Role of Pre-Venture Adversity on Founder Identity Construction

It’s Always Darkest Before Dawn: The Role of Pre-Venture Adversity on Founder Identity Construction

To profit or not to profit: Founder identity at the intersection of religion and entrepreneurship

For more than a century, discussion of the connections between religion and entrepreneurship has pointed to what we would now label questions of identity. Our study of 25 participants in a program in Northern Kenya that aimed to introduce and stimulate capitalist entrepreneurship within extremely poor pastoralist communities shows that differences in participants' religious social identities strongly shaped whether or not they adopted new roles and role identities as capitalist entrepreneurs. This process also shifted the domains in which their religious and collectivist social identities were salient and helped to explain the emergence of important and contested changes in social and economic relations. We contribute to the development of founder identity theory by building research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and religion and at the intersection of entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation.

Unraveling the nexus of academic founders and innovation performance: The suppression effect of ownership structure within Sci‐Tech enterprises

AbstractThis paper aims to examine the influence of academic founders on firm innovation performance from the perspective of equity distribution in entrepreneurial teams. Based on the prospectus data of 466 science and technology enterprises that applied for registration on the STAR Market from 2016 to 2020, we use textual analysis to classify founder identities into academic founder, technical founder, and business founder. Our results show that the performance of technical innovation in Sci‐Tech enterprises is optimal for academic founder‐led firms, followed by technical founders, and finally business founders. Ownership structure suppresses the positive direct relationship between the academic founder and innovation performance.

The Births, Lives and Deaths of Corporations in Late Imperial Russia

Abstract Enterprise creation, destruction and evolution support the transition to modern economic growth, yet these processes are poorly understood in industrialising contexts. We investigate Imperial Russia's industrial development at the firm level by examining entry, exit and persistence of corporations. Relying on newly developed balance sheet panel data from every non-financial Russian corporation (more than 2,500 of them) between 1899 and 1914, we examine the characteristics of entering and exiting corporations, how new entrants evolved and the impact of founder identity on subsequent outcomes. Russian corporations evolved within a market environment, conditional on overcoming distortionary institutional barriers to entry that slowed the emergence of these leading firms in the Imperial economy.

From Complexity to Hybridity: A Creation Model of Founder Identity

From Complexity to Hybridity: A Creation Model of Founder Identity

Founder Identity Threat in Nascent Entrepreneurs: Threatened Identity During New Venture Distress

Founder Identity Threat in Nascent Entrepreneurs: Threatened Identity During New Venture Distress

Who Do I Want to Be Now That I’m Here? Refugee Entrepreneurs, Identity, and Acculturation

This article focuses on a subset of refugees who engage in entrepreneurship shortly after relocating to a new host community; it explores identity-related antecedents and integration consequences of different entrepreneurship strategies in the new location. It draws from acculturation psychology and founder identity theory to argue that, post-arrival, new refugees consider (a) how to prioritize the identity associated with their former life and (b) the degree of connection they desire in the host community. For some, these preferences drive heterogeneous entrepreneurial behaviors associated with different acculturation outcomes—including marginalization, separation, integration, and assimilation. Specifically, we describe two refugee entrepreneur identity management strategies: reinvention (distance from home country identity) and reinforcement (close connection to home country identity) and propose their different acculturation outcomes. The theory-based arguments emphasize how attending to identity preferences of refugees can improve stakeholder responses. The article also illustrates why refugee integration can remain elusive, as not all refugees with successful ventures integrate.

Individuating: how founder's social identities shape their evaluation of opportunities

PurposeThis paper adds to the ongoing debate on judgements, opportunity evaluation and founder identity theory and shows that founders vary in their prioritisation and combination of judgement criteria, linked to their respective social founder identity. It further reveals how this variation among founder identity types shapes their perception of distinct entrepreneurial opportunities and the forming of first-person opportunity beliefs.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a qualitative approach by presenting three business scenarios to a sample of 34 first-time founders. It adopts a first-person perspective on their cognitive processes during the evaluation of entrepreneurial opportunities using verbal protocol and content analysis techniques.FindingsThe theorised model highlights the use of similar categories of judgement criteria by individual founders during opportunity evaluation that followed two distinct stages, namely search and validation. Yet, founders individualised their judgement process through the prioritisation of different judgement criteria.Originality/valueThe authors provide new insights into how individuals individuate entrepreneurial opportunities through the choice of different judgement criteria that enable them to develop opportunity confidence during opportunity evaluation. The study also shows that first-time founders depict variations in their cognitive frames that are based on their social identity types as they assess opportunity-related information and elicit variations in reciprocal relationships emerging between emotion and cognition. Exposing these subjective cognitive evaluative processes provides theoretical and practical implications that are discussed as well.

Entrepreneurial heuristics: Making strategic decisions in highly uncertain environments

Entrepreneurs use heuristics more than other groups of decision-makers do, particularly when developing strategies in highly uncertain environments. We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with founders of recently created ventures to identify the heuristics they use for strategic decisions and then analyzed these from the perspective of their roles (what these are used for) and functions (how these fulfill their role). Our results show that heuristics are the primary decision-making strategy for inexperienced entrepreneurs and suggest that they are useful in the entrepreneurial process for (1) organizing the venture, (2) projecting the founder's identity onto their ventures, and (3) exchanging information between the venture and the market. We also expand on the conceptualization of heuristics as simple rules used in decision-making by uncovering a new functional type: metacognitive heuristics.

Streamliners, Switchmen and Bridge Builders: About the Mechanisms and Uniqueness of Accelerator Programs

Accelerators are a new and fast-growing element in entrepreneurial ecosystems. However, our understanding about their impact on the development of startups remains limited. Utilizing a grounded theory approach and in-depth interviews with 21 entrepreneurs, this study investigates the value-adding mechanisms of accelerators. Our analysis, however, is not limited to financial capital, which allows us to highlight the relative importance of different forms of capital in the context of accelerators. We aim to understand how accelerators stimulate the development of participants and extend the support landscape for early-stage startups. Our results are threefold. First, we demonstrate that accelerators facilitate every step in the resource mobilization by reducing uncertainties and compensating for deficiencies. Second, the founding process becomes more structured, as participants build a founder identity and the process itself is professionalized. Third, accelerators support startups in building a resource base, by providing immediate resources and building bridges to various other resources.

Logics and Founder Identity: The Enabling Effect of Identification

Past work experience exposes entrepreneurs to the logics of pertinent institutional fields. Entrepreneurs integrate elements of these logics (e.g., values, meanings, beliefs, norms) into their founder identity—that is, what is important to them as a founder and what they do in their startup firm. Nevertheless, this process can be contingent on individual characteristics, and it is unclear why elements of some logics are integrated while those of others are not. Leveraging recent research on identification, we develop a theory about how institutional identification moderates the relationship between past exposure to logic and the formation of founder identity. We conducted a survey study with entrepreneurs from young startups to understand how past exposure to the social welfare logic and identification with this logic independently and jointly affect the dominant social welfare (over commercial) tendency of their founder identity. Our findings suggest that past exposure to logic and identification with logic are not significantly associated with the dominant social welfare tendency of entrepreneurs’ founder identity on their own, but they interact to influence founder identity. More specifically, past exposure to the social welfare logic negatively predicts entrepreneurs’ dominant social welfare tendency of founder identity when their identification with this logic is low. Our study contributes to the micro-foundations of institutional theory by identifying critical boundary conditions of how logics influence individuals’ identities and behaviors.

Search and Validation: How Individuation Drives the Opportunity Evaluation of Founders

This paper adds to the ongoing debate on opportunity evaluation, entrepreneurial action and founder identity theory. By presenting 34 first-time founders with 3 business scenarios, we explored the influence of distinct social founder identities on their cognitive processes during opportunity evaluation. Through the use of verbal protocol analysis, we theorized a model that highlights the use of different judgment categories during distinct stages, namely search and validation. We contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by showing how individuation drives the opportunity confidence of individuals and leads to decisions about the abortion or commencement of opportunities. Lastly, we highlight reciprocal relationships between emotions and cognition during opportunity evaluation.

Connecting the Prosocial Action Mosaic: An Identity Lens on Student Food Insecurity

A longitudinal field study of 11 on-campus food pantries and their founders allowed us to investigate what we label the “Prosocial Action Matrix” that interconnects the various forms of prosocial action that coalesce around an emerging social issue—in this case, student food insecurity. We discovered that the connection between the social movements that shape who founders are outside of work and who they seek to be through their prosocial venturing is strongly shaped by the nature of the broader role through which they are attached to a university bureaucracy. This has powerful implications for how founders enact the social issue, for continued activism as founders, and for how their strategies envision the social identities of beneficiaries and the social construction of stigma. The theory and process model we develop broaden and enrich Founder Identity Theory and provide a platform for research that better comprehends how various overlapping forms of organizing importantly shape the context of prosocial venturing.

Contextualizing founder identity in coworking spaces

ABSTRACT Coworking spaces – which combine an office workspace with a social space – enable collaboration, creativity and knowledge exchange, and offer opportunities to develop social and professional networks for users. Using a multilevel approach, we integrate data from two sources – at the level of the coworking space (N = 57) and the entrepreneur (N = 317) – and apply SEM to test our hypotheses. Our study finds that innovation-based narratives generated by coworking space providers significantly influence new venture growth for entrepreneurs within the space. The results also show that the alignment between the entrepreneur’s identity and the perceived social structure of a coworking space (the immediate entrepreneurial space) positively influences new venture growth. Taken together, we propose an extension to the founder identity literature by integrating psychological and sociological theories of identity to explain how the reciprocal relationship between context and identity is critical to new venture performance.

Understanding Israeli Start-Up Founders in the context of “Tikkun Olam”

Context impacts a start-up founder’s behavior, activities and choices. This study uses the three founder identities introduced by Fauchart and Gruber (2011) Darwinian, communitarian and missionary to classify Israeli start-up founders who have created diverse products. It presents an innovative context-based interpretation of Tikkun Olam – which in Hebrew means ‘making the world a better place’ as a possible explanation for the relatively large number of Israeli start-up founders who were found to have a hybrid identity.

Digital product innovation approaches in entrepreneurial firms – the role of entrepreneurs’ cognitive frames

What explains how entrepreneurial firms organise digital product innovation? A unique characteristic of digital artefacts is their perpetual incompleteness, as they are “constantly in the making”. This study examines the role that this constant change that characterises digital artifacts plays in explaining how small, entrepreneurial firms manage digital product innovation. Drawing from research on founder identity and employing a cognitive frame theoretical lens, we conduct a multi-case study research design involving 15 founders of small size digital ventures. Our analysis finds that the entrepreneurs developed substantive interpretations about change in the content of their product, and about the nature of the process involved in the development and commercialisation of their products. Based on combinations between product change frames (minor versus major) and change in process frames (stable versus dynamic process frames), we identify four distinct approaches entrepreneurial firms take to manage digital product innovations. These approaches include: strategic innovation, experimental innovation, content innovation and learning experiments. Our findings contribute to product innovation research by developing a typology that provides a new conceptualisation of the approaches to manage innovation in digital products that takes into account the continuous change that characterises the content and process involved in digital artefacts.