Flip the tweet – the two-sided coin of entrepreneurial empathy and its ambiguous influence on new product development

Konstantin Kurz, Carolin Bock and Leonard Hanschur

Journal of Business Venturing, 2024, vol. 39, issue 2

Abstract: Is empathy a uniformly good thing for entrepreneurs? Contrasting the hitherto predominantly positive view advocated by the extant entrepreneurship literature, we develop a novel model of entrepreneurial empathy's mechanisms and suggest a ‘too-much-of-a-good-thing’ perspective. We empirically confirm this model using a dataset of 4425 real entrepreneurs, where we find that empathy influences entrepreneurial new product development as an essential entrepreneurial activity in an inverted U-shaped pattern. We further show that empathy's negative effects are particularly detrimental for very anxious entrepreneurs. These findings provide strong evidence for considering entrepreneurial empathy an important but highly ambiguous success factor.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial empathy; Entrepreneurial new product development; Entrepreneurial cognitive bias; Anxiety; Big data; Textual analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C45 C55 D91 L26 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902623000927
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jbvent:v:39:y:2024:i:2:s0883902623000927

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2023.106378

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Venturing is currently edited by S. Venkataraman

More articles in Journal of Business Venturing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().