Betting on the Coachable Entrepreneur: Signaling and Social Exchange in Entrepreneurial Pitches

Michael P. Ciuchta, Chaim Letwin, Regan Stevenson, Sean McMahon and M. Nesij Huvaj

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2018, vol. 42, issue 6, 860-885

Abstract: Given that stakeholders often commit more than capital to a startup, they commonly stress how important it is for entrepreneurs to be “coachable.†To date, however, coachability has received little attention in entrepreneurship research. We address this gap by first establishing the entrepreneurial coachability construct and validating a measurement scale. Then, drawing on social exchange and signaling theories, we develop and test a novel framework in which coachability influences a potential investor’s willingness to invest. We find that entrepreneurial coachability functions as a viable signal in a pitch setting, but this impact is conditional on the investor’s prior coaching experience.

Keywords: coachability; new venture finance; social exchange theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (27)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1042258717725520 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:entthe:v:42:y:2018:i:6:p:860-885

DOI: 10.1177/1042258717725520

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().