Toward a Theory of Serial Entrepreneurship: Decomposing Entrepreneurial Experience
The focus of this dissertation is to examine the nature of the entrepreneur's prior experience and how it affects entrepreneurs' intentions to reenter entrepreneurship after business exit (i.e. serial entrepreneurship intentions). Drawing on psychology theories, I argue that there is qualitative difference among entrepreneurial experiences and suggest that one's entrepreneurial experience can be decomposed into three factors: financial performance, self-efficacy, and psychological ownership. Those three factors will jointly determine serial entrepreneurship intention. In addition, those three situational factors would interact with the individual's dispositional regulatory focus orientations to affect serial entrepreneurship intention. To this end, I conducted two experimental studies with 175 undergraduate students and 65 entrepreneurs and wrote three essays. Essay 1 examines the variance in the entrepreneurs' intentions to reenter entrepreneurship by investigating the qualitative difference of entrepreneurial experience (i.e. financial success vs. financial failure) and how this difference affects intention to reenter entrepreneurship. The results show that prior success (failure) experience lowers (increases) the individual's entrepreneurial intention. Moreover, this relationship will be weakened by the individual's entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Essay 2 looks into intention to reenter from the dispositional perspective to complement Essay 1. Specifically, this essay demonstrates that, in addition to prior entrepreneurial experience, the entrepreneurs' dispositional regulatory focus orientations would also predict their intentions to reenter entrepreneurship after business exit. More interestingly, the dispositional regulatory orientations will interact with the outcome of prior entrepreneurial experience (i.e. financial success or failure) to affect intention to reenter. Essay 3 investigates the relationship between the entrepreneur's psychological ownership toward the prior venture and intention to reenter entrepreneurship. The results show that psychological ownership is positively related to intention to reenter and that this relationship will be enhanced by the entrepreneur's dispositional prevention focus orientation. In sum, this dissertation provides a theoretical framework on how prior entrepreneurial experience shapes intention to reenter entrepreneurship. The results indicate that the financial performance of the prior venture, the entrepreneur's self-efficacy, the entrepreneur's prevention focus orientation, and the entrepreneur's psychological ownership toward the venture would interactively determine the entrepreneur's intention to reenter entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurial Experience, Prospect Theory, Psychological Ownership, Regulatory Focus, Self-Efficacy, Serial Entrepreneurship, Psychology
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