Causal Attribution, Negative Emotion Coping Strategy And Learning From Initial Entrepreneur Failure

Entrepreneur failure is a critical element in entrepreneur research. Researches focuson the relationship between entrepreneur failure and the subsequent learning.Existing researches propose there is significant correlation between failureexperience and the subsequent learning. What are the main factors affecting thelearning outcome from failure and how they affect it? These are the questions thedissertation tries to answer.Integrating the theory of casual attribution, coping strategy and experientiallearning, we propose a theoretical model with causal attribution, negative emotioncoping strategy and learning after entrepreneur failure and build our hypotheses.The research samples of our research were entrepreneurs with initialentrepreneur failure experiences. Through empirical study, we examined therelationship between causal attributions and learning outcome from business failure,we also analyzed the relationship between negative emotion coping strategy andlearning outcome and the moderated effect of coping strategy. Our results indicatedthat both the attribution and the negative emotion coping strategy have positiveinfluence on learning outcome, what’s more, the coping strategy positively moderatethe relationship between causal attribution and learning outcome from businessfailure.This study has some theoretical significance. First, we explained the innerrelationship between two viewpoints of entrepreneur failure. Whether the failure hasa positive effect or a negative effect to learning depends on some individual factorssuch as the differences of causal attribution and coping strategy. Second, wesupplemented the emotion recovery theory. We indicated that, both causal attributionand coping strategy are important element in the recovery process after entrepreneurfailure, the appropriateness of what can benefit the process of recovery and promote entrepreneur learning. Furthermore, the dissertation makes a new perspective tofuture entrepreneur research based on entrepreneur failure.