When the going gets tough, the entrepreneurs get less entrepreneurial?

We investigate how the 2008-2012 economic crisis relates to entrepreneurs' confidence ten years later and, in turn, their venture's entrepreneurial orientation. Conceptually, we introduce the new concept of 'hard times' to capture an entrepreneur's sense of their venture's hardship during the crisis. Theoretically, we extend ideas on imprinting, to build the argument that hard times cause a persistent reduction in an entrepreneur's entrepreneurial self-efficacy and sense of job security, both of which in turn cause a contemporaneous reduction in their venture's entrepreneurial orientation. We contrast the crisis imprinting hypothesis with a hypothesis from the more established behavioral theory of the firm. Strikingly, rich data of about 300 Flemish entrepreneurs and their ventures are in line with a small crisis imprinting effect.

Stuck in short-term, daily operations, or not?: Unraveling SME's long-term orientation.

Long-term orientation (LTO) is an essential strategic option for firms to shape their future success, in particular for SMEs which are often submerged by daily operations. Surprisingly, little is known about the underlying personal and contextual drivers of LTO in an SME context. To unravel why some SME entrepreneurs adopt an LTO, while others seem to be stuck in short term and daily operations, we consider the (interacting) impact of both personal and contextual drivers. We carefully select well known drivers for their impact on various other aspects of SME's LTO: Need for achievement, as a personal driver, and the entrepreneur's perception of the institutional entrepreneurial support (PIES), as a contextual driver. The latter consists of a regulative, normative and cognitive institutional dimension. Based on a study on 176 SMEs in an emerging country, Indonesia, we confirm that both personal as well as contextual drivers individually and interactively impact an SME's LTO. Specifically, when highly achievement motivated entrepreneurs perceive that institutional regulations support entrepreneurial activities, they tend to adopt a higher level of LTO. We discuss implications for SMEs and policy makers, and provide suggestions for future research.

The added value of implicit motives for management research Development and first validation of a Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) for the measurement of implicit motives.

Many Management (sub-)disciplines, from Organizational Behavior and Marketing to Accounting and Strategy, are interested in antecedents and consequences of individual attitudes and traits. A key aspect of personality profiles are explicit and implicit motives. Yet, Management scholars mainly focus on explicit motives, with limited attention to implicit motives. We argue that this state of affairs probably came into being because current Management researchers mainly rely on implicit motive measures that are either difficult to apply or to develop, hampering researchers from applying implicit motive measures. To overcome the downsides of available instruments, we develop a Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) as an efficient, reliable and valid measure of implicit motives, particularly the needs for achievement, affiliation and power. To explore our BIAT's predictive validity, we apply this measure to a specific research domain within Management: Entrepreneurship. We examine implicit motives' association with entrepreneurial self-efficacy, business founding, and financial profitability. Our results show that the introduction of implicit motives can unlock stranded discussions in this research domain. Overall, we argue that implicit motives can help to push the boundaries of the study of deep-level attributes in a wide range of organizational and managerial settings.