Effects Of Entrepreneur’s Positive Affect On Entrepreneurial Cognition

Entrepreneurship has become a common phenomenon. At present, there are many domestic and foreign scholars to study the entrepreneur’s cognitive impact on entrepreneurial performance. But there are few scholars study how the entrepreneur’s trait positive affect influence their entrepreneurial cognition, thereby affecting the performance of the business.Based on theoretical literature researching, we argues that, to assure business success, not only entrepreneurs need to have entrepreneurial cognition, but also need to build other psychological factors, such as positive affect, positive affect as a psychological trait will affect their cognitive processes, thereby influence their entrepreneurial success. Based on the positive affect theory, entrepreneurship cognitive theory, Positive affect and cognition relations theory, we constructed a theory model to illustrate how positive affect influence the entrepreneurial cognition and entrepreneurial performance. To verify this model, we take Jack Ma and his entrepreneurial journey as the study sample, collect the secondary data through Jack Ma’s related books, literature and video. Then, we use content analysis method to encode data, verify and develop the hypothesizes. Finally, we get the following findings:(1)positive affect through two paths to influence their entrepreneurial cognition, one is through the heuristic processing to influence the entrepreneurial willingness script; another route through the construction process to influence entrepreneurial ability script and arrangement script, and the positive affect will eventually strengthen entrepreneurial intention, expand cognitive scope and improve entrepreneurial ability.(2)Different levels of positive emotions will produce different mechanism. High positive affect entrepreneurs easy to start heuristic process to develop their entrepreneurial willingness script, and promote the willingness to start a business; low positive affect entrepreneur easy to start construction process, through this process, they can construct the arrangements scrip and the ability script.(3)Entrepreneurial success, not only need entrepreneurs have entrepreneurial positive affect, but also need to develop other mental abilities according to their affect type. For entrepreneurs with high entrepreneurial positive affect, we propose to improve their mental toughness, through continue entrepreneurship to accumulate entrepreneurial knowledge, skills and social network resources, and actively construct individual entrepreneurship arrangements script and ability script. For entrepreneurs with low positive affect, we proposes to help them raise optimism, establish positive expectations, and reasonably attribute, through this to improve entrepreneurial willingness script, develop entrepreneurial intention.