Kelly G. Shaver

• Ph.D.
• Professor at College of Charleston

Although there is an extensive body of research that empirically examines the antecedents and outcomes of corporate social responsibility (CSR), much less attention has been accorded to theory development that would suggest why firms engage in CSR, when, and how these initiatives pay off. In this paper, we propose an integrated model of the relatio...

This research describes the results of a national survey of entrepreneurial mindset conducted with 3,194 randomly selected individuals in a representative national sample. Several other measures of entrepreneurial personal characteristics appear in the literature. These include the Entrepreneurial Attitude Orientation measure (cf. EAO, Robinson, St...

Although there has been increasing recent interest in universities as ecosystems for the encouragement of academic entrepreneurship, almost none of that work has dealt with the specific personal motives that might lead academic scientists to start companies. Metaphorically, there has been a substantial body of work describing how to create a better...

It can be argued that there are two basic questions in entrepreneurship research. Why do some people start new ventures and others do not? Among those who choose to start, how do their actions translate ideas into new products, services, and companies? We propose an integrated process model of goal striving that builds on self-efficacy, goal settin...

Extrinsic and intrinsic motivations are simple concepts that our students seem to quickly understand, yet few of our students grasp the complexity of sustaining intrinsic motivation. This exercise aims to help students better understand that complexity. Students are given a two-part scenario. In Part 1, the individual motives to innovate are intrin...

This chapter describes several of the ideas borrowed from psychology (mostly, though not exclusively, from personality and social psychology) that have been adapted for use in entrepreneurship. It then addresses the issues that arise when “the founder” changes to a “founding team”. Beginning with McClelland's early work on the relationship between...

To help explain events and behavior, people search for causes. In some cases the identified causes are found within persons, in other cases they are found in the environment, in still other cases they are found in the interaction between person and environment. When provided with multiple opportunities for observation, people typically follow a pri...

An entrepreneurial venture cannot succeed if it is not begun, so an entrepreneur’s decision to start is absolutely critical. That decision will be affected by the entrepreneur’s beliefs about what personal traits are needed and whether she/he has them. Once started, an entrepreneurial venture only very rarely can be scaled without external financia...

Originally published in 1987 this third edition won praise from students and instructors alike for its challenging "no nonsense" approach to the field. Thoroughly updated to reflect current research of the time, the text retains the qualities that had become its hallmarks: a cognitive approach to the process of socialization, and an emphasis on the...

Provides an informal introduction to the field of attribution, with the theoretical principles and issues illustrated in everyday examples. The origins of current attribution theory are outlined, and models of the inference process are examined. The intellectual debt owed to social psychology by the attribution theory is acknowledged, and an explor...

Locus of control has been extensively examined in entrepreneurship research, but with mixed results. This may be due to measurement issues, such as the widespread use of Rotter’s (1966) general locus of control scale, which is not domain specific. Not surprisingly, Rotter’s scale has been shown to be multidimensional, including personal efficacy. W...

Economics, history, organizational theory, psychology, public policy, social psychology, sociology, and strategy have all had something to say about business creation. Though the multiple lenses have produced important insights, they have not always defined the phenomenon in terms that can easily be translated from one discipline to another. Operat...

This article investigates differences in growth intentions of men and women entrepreneurs. Using data from the U.S. Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics I and II, we test hypotheses informed by life course theory regarding the influence of career stage and family status on high growth intentions of men and women entrepreneurs. Results show that...

Women are the majority owners of 30% (6.7 million) of all privately held firms in the US. The vast majority of these firms, however, are smaller than average with only 16% achieving annual revenues of more than $500,000. This suggests that women may have different expectations for the growth of their ventures than men. Using the US Panel Study of E...

This Handbook brings together in one volume a collection of essays that explore the current state of the art of university-wide entrepreneurship education programs. Twenty-nine authors from different disciplines in universities in five countries discuss the opportunities and universal challenges in extending entrepreneurship education outside the b...

Social psychology has traditionally divided its study of meaningful social behavior into the intrapersonal processes that affect action and the interpersonal processes that describe relationships between two and more individuals. This chapter describes some of the intrapersonal factors – social cognitive processes, attributions, attitudes, and elem...

To help explain events and behavior, people search for causes. In some cases the identified causes are found within persons, in other cases they are found in the environment, in still other cases they are found in the interaction between person and environment. When provided with multiple opportunities for observation, people typically follow a pri...

This study explores the label ‘opportunity’ in the strategic issue literature as a point of departure for offering an attributional framework for categorizing opportunities entrepreneurs offer as they undertake efforts to start businesses. The strategic issue literature broadly labels opportunities as being positive and controllable and involving p...

The Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics data were used to analyze if the potential for increased life satisfaction pulls or job dissatisfaction pushes individuals toward an entrepreneurial career. For life satisfaction, we found no significant mean differences between nascent entrepreneurs and the comparison group, whereas for job satisfaction,...

Shane and Venkataraman (2000) state that entrepreneurship “…involves…the processes of discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities...” Despite its importance and the research attention it has received to date, the process of opportunity recognition (OpRec) is not as well understood as it might be. Our study adds to the literature by com...

We examine the long standing question in entrepreneurship: why do some, but not others, become entrepreneurs? More specifically, we test if job dissatisfaction "pushes" or the potential for increased life satisfaction "pulls" individuals to pursue an entrepreneurial career. We use the PSED data set to analyze if nascent entrepreneurs were "pulled"...

This handbook reports on the creation andresults of the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) that wasconducted by the Entrepreneurship Research Consortium (ERC), founded in 1995.The PSED was created to develop a representative portrait of entrepreneurialactivity in the United States.A panel of nascent entrepreneurs wascreated, along with...

Career reasons A s outlined in Kolvereid (1996b), the reasons that potential entrepreneurs offer for getting into business should have a significant influence on whether they actually engage in entrepreneurial activity (Krueger & Brazeal, 1994). New businesses are not created by accident. There is enough impeding the process involved in business st...

This paper explores the reasons that nascent entrepreneurs offered for their work and career choices and compares those responses to the reasons given by a group of nonentrepreneurs. Six separate factors accounted for 68% of the variance: self-realization, financial success, roles, innovation, recognition, and independence. The factor scores of nas...

Research to date has not adequately explained the role that expectancy of entrepreneurial performance based on perceived ability plays in motivating persons to persevere on an entrepreneurial task. This study investigated the entrepreneurial expectancy, effort-performance linkage via a World Wide Web–based experiment involving 179 undergraduate bus...

The use of attribution theory as a framework and methodology is described (in comparison with more traditional qualitative methods) for evaluating the responses of nascent entrepreneurs and explaining the choices they make when they become involved in business startup activities. A theoretical background for attributional coding is used to describe...

The reviewer states that the "trouble with blame" is that perpetrators receive too little and victims take too much. This is the crux of a thoughtful discussion of individual and societal responses to the victimization of women by men. Recognizing that the perpetrators of sex crimes are predominantly male and the victims are predominantly female, L...

Explores whether specific cognitive attributes of potential entrepreneurs can be used to predict future startup success and persistence in business startup activities. Two hypotheses are proposed and tested: (1) potential entrepreneurs who offer internal and stable explanations (attributions) for their plans for getting into business should be more...

The editors of this special issue on "Finding the Entrepreneur in Entrepreneurship" offer an overview of the concept behind the special issue, and summarize the articles included in the special issue.

Psychology can be distinguished from other behavioral sciences by its emphasis on the behavior of the individual person. Behavior, in turn, is influenced by the way in which the external world is represented in the mind, and by the individual's exercise of choice. The article examines the possibility that relatively enduring attributes of the perso...

The American criminal justice system guarantees each citizen the right to a trial by a fair and impartial jury. Because juror biases might impede realization of this guarantee, the law provides a protection for defendants–the presumption of innocence. Three experiments were conducted to assess presumptions of innocence directly. In the first two ex...

The field of social psychology encompasses established theory, recent research, and practical application, and an introductory textbook must choose which of these to emphasize. Like its predecessors, this third edition of "Principles of Social Psychology" concentrates on the ideas that have provided continuity to the discipline through the years....

Examples from the literature on "self-blame" for illness (Tennen, Affleck, & Gershman, 1986) and criminal victimization (Janoff-Bulman, 1979) illustrate insufficient attention to construct validity in the measurement of causality, responsibility, and blameworthiness. Distinctions among these terms have been drawn in detail in a recent theory of the...

Notwithstanding Hart’s (1968) notion of “causality responsibility,” there is, as we have seen, a fundamental difference between “caused” and “was responsible for.” Many causes can exist independent of intervention by human beings—tornadoes cause extensive damage, bacteria cause disease in animals, lengthening spring days cause new leaves to appear...

Attitudes toward aging obtained in the National Council on Aging national attitude survey are examined in light of recent developments in attributional theory. A specific principle drawn from each of the three major attribution theories is applied to findings from the survey. It is argued that (a) mandatory retirement policies may be attributionall...

An experiment was conducted to investigate the influence of both informational and motivational factors on observers' attributions. Observers evaluated the behavior of a "student therapist" who attempted to follow a prescribed procedure for reducing minor phobia in a presumed client. Observers were informed of the Probable Outcome of the therapy (p...

The effect of three variables thought to be important to the negotiation process was investigated via an attributional analysis. Three different communication modes (audio, audio/video, face-to-face), three levels of power (high, equal, low), and three prior concession-phasing strategies (alternating, increasingly cooperative, decreasingly cooperat...

This paper argues that the legal principle of discretion forms an excellent basis for the participation of social psychology in the criminal justice system. Social and psychological factors that enter into arrest, investigation, selective enforcement, plea- bargaining, criminal sentences, and prison operation are reviewed. The bibliography includes...

Conducted 3 experiments, using 44, 34, and 46 undergraduates as Ss, to examine the following proposition: An O of an accident, to preclude the possibility that he could cause such a misfortune, will attribute responsibility for its occurrence to a person potentially responsible, and will attempt to differentiate himself from that person. This tende...

Two experiments were conducted to test the possibility that greater attributed responsibility to persons potentially at fault for severe accidents reflects a greater perceived necessity for compensation of the victim of the accident. Experiment I was a 2 × 2 factorial design in which the severity of the accident's consequences and whether or not th...

The Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics I (PSED I) was the first opportunity to collect nationally representative information on a rarely studied group: individuals that engage in business startup activities for many years without establishing operational businesses. For these individuals, entrepreneurship is a costly pursuit in which they expe...

Entrepreneurial success depends in part on the relationships the founder is able to forge with others. People with relevant skills and experience have to be recruited to be part of the startup team. Mentors, advisors, and investors have to be convinced that the venture is worth their time, effort, or financial support. Terms favorable to the ventur...

Subjects were tested in groups of nine for the presence of the positively valued trait of intellectual flexibility (Pos conditions) or the negatively valued trait of intellectual rigidity (Neg conditions). The subjects were told the approximate range of the group's test scores (R conditions) or they were not told the range (NR conditions). After th...

Investigated the effects of varying distributions of success and failure on attributions of intellectual ability. In Exp. I-IV undergraduate Ss confronted a stimulus person who solved 15 out of 30 problems in a random, descending, or ascending success pattern. In Exp. V only the descending and ascending patterns were compared. Contrary to predictio...