When Affect Positively Affects the Entrepreneur

What factors foster entrepreneurs' ability to recognize and pursue successfully novel opportunities? How does the interplay of their emotions and cognitive processes affect the rise of new ideas? In the paper The Role of Affect in The Creation and Intentional Pursuit of Entrepreneurial Ideas (doi:10.1111/j.1540-6520.2011.00458.x), recently published in the special issue The Heart of Entrepreneurship of the Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Journal (volume 36, issue 1, pages 41-68), Magdalena Cholakova (Department of Management and Technology) and James Hayton (Newcastle Business School) elaborate a new theoretical framework to answer these questions.

The relevance of affect (a broad term that includes emotions and moods) in entrepreneurial decision making has increasingly sparked researchers' attention, as the uncertainty of entrepreneurial judgment inevitably heightens the emotional state of individuals, thus making affect an integral part of this process. However, rather than focusing on the role of affect in the context of entrepreneurial action, the authors take a step back and address its relevance for the initial idea generation and motivation to pursue it. In particular, Hayton and Cholakova develop a novel perspective that aims to integrate entrepreneurial thinking and feeling and explain how their interplay influences the entrepreneurial idea development.

In their conceptual paper, the authors have elaborated a series of propositions, which address how positive affect interacts with entrepreneurs' attitudes, working memory, and creativity in the process of idea perception. In particular, positive affect is expected to increase the probability of perceiving relevant idea-stimulating information and the ability to hold and recall a greater amount of information and ideas in working memory. It is also predicted that being in a positive affective state would increase the individual's capacity to combine this information in creative ways, thus increasing the likelihood to develop the entrepreneurial idea. Furthermore, Hayton and Cholakova also discuss the factors that can then predict the motivation to pursue the recognized opportunity, drawing upon expectancy theory and the theory of planned behavior. They argue that positive affect will increase the expectancy, instrumentality and valence of the individual's beliefs, such that they will be able to perceive a larger set of means-ends connections and secondary outcomes of the idea. This, in turn, is predicted to reduce the uncertainty associated with this idea and encourage its pursuit. Last but not least, the authors discuss a set of boundary conditions to the idea generation and pursuit process, namely the specific human capital of the individuals, their level of familiarity with the entrepreneurial idea, its complexity and finally its potential similarity to the core self-identity of the entrepreneur.

Overall, Hayton and Cholakova adopt an entrepreneur's eye-view of the phenomenon of idea generation and pursuit and develop a framework that effectively captures both affective and cognitive influences on the perception of new opportunities. Therefore, rather than seeing affect as fostering irrational behavior, which is typically suggested in the literature, the authors outline a model, which captures affect as an integral part of successful entrepreneurship instead.