Robert Baron

Robert Baron
Oklahoma state university stillwater · School of entrepeneurship

About

173
Publications
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Introduction

Publications

Publications (173)
Article
Recognition of potentially valuable business opportunities is often the start of entrepreneurship. The present research focused on entrepreneurial alertness, which has been found to play a role in this process. Previous research has highlighted the effects of alertness; we seek to extend this research regarding alertness by investigating its antece...
Article
Why are some persons more likely than others to recognize potentially valuable opportunities? Many factors play a role, but one—alertness—emphasizes the importance of skills and abilities that prepare individuals to recognize opportunities overlooked by others. The higher individuals are in alertness, the more likely they are to discover opportunit...
Article
Full-text available
Digital platforms and associated ecosystems provide a promising new environment for entrepreneurship. While the benefits to entrepreneurs (and new ventures) associated with membership in these ecosystems are well understood (e.g., market access), the associated costs or "downsides" are yet to be studied. Digital ecosystems require entrepreneurs to...
Article
Entrepreneurs often need external resources to found their new ventures. These can be obtained from many sources, but government sponsored programs are an important and often desirable one because they do not require repayment of the funds provided. Resources from such programs should, in principle, be equally available to all entrepreneurs, but in...
Article
Academic and popular discussions of social entrepreneurship often point to the importance of social value creation in contributing to a social venture's success. Implied in these discussions is the assumption that the more pressing the social problem addressed by the mission or the greater the social value generated, the more successful and attract...
Article
Research summary This study examines the relationships of founding CEO s' intangible resources (human, social, and psychological capital) with the performance of their firms in environmental contexts of discovery (stable industry conditions that are characterized by risk) versus creation (dynamic industry conditions that are characterized by uncert...
Article
Goal setting theory suggests that difficult goals enhance performance on many tasks. When goals are so difficult as to be unattainable, however, they may generate discouragement and reduced motivation, with the result that performance, too, is decreased. Previous research indicates that entrepreneurs are high in self-efficacy and, as a result, may...
Article
Full-text available
Donn Byrne, eminent personality and social psychologist, contributor of foundational theory and research in domains including interpersonal attraction, human sexuality, repression-sensitization, and authoritarianism, died in Feura Bush, New York, August 10, 2014, at age 82. Byrne was born on December 19, 1931, in Austin, Texas. He authored a substa...
Article
In contrast to what has been a common belief still ten years ago, the prevailing wisdom now is that U.S. natural gas demand can be met entirely with natural gas produced domestically and at relatively low prices (around $5/MMBtu). Moreover, there might even be the opportunity for the U.S. to become a net exporter of natural gas. In this vein, DOE t...
Article
The authors integrate the entrepreneurship literature's sociological and behavioral perspectives and examine the processes through which entrepreneurs first build social networks and then use the network resources for enhancing venture performance. Field interviews of entrepreneurs during a six-month period reveal that political skill is an importa...
Article
Full-text available
Entrepreneurs sometimes make unethical decisions that have devastating effects on their companies, stakeholders, and themselves. We suggest that insights into the origins of such actions can be acquired through attention to personal motives and their impact on moral disengagement—a cognitive process that deactivates moral self-regulation, thus enab...
Article
It was hypothesized that a higher level of motivation would be induced among Ss by instructions which defined a given situation as skill controlled than by instructions which defined the same situation as chance controlled. In order to test this hypothesis a situation in which Ss’ dominant responses were reinforced was employed. Results indicated t...
Article
Eighty undergraduate males received either a positive or a negative personal evaluation from an attitudinally similar or dissimilar confederate. Experimental sessions were conducted under either comfortably cool (73°F) or uncomfortably hot (92°F) environmental conditions. Attraction toward the confederate was primarily influenced by the personal ev...
Article
Thirty-two undergraduate females participated in an experiment designed to investigate the effects of magnitude of apparent suffering of a live peer model and the instructions concerning their ability to aid this individual on O reaction time (RT). It was predicted that under conditions where Os were informed that they could influence the suffering...
Article
Innovation ecosystems have emerged as an important context for entrepreneurship. Ecosystem entrepreneurs, however, face a unique set of challenges associated with the need to balance the goals and priorities set by the ecosystem leader with the goals and priorities of the new venture. We focus on ecosystem entrepreneurs' self-regulatory processes a...
Article
The effects of prior exposure to an initial request of small or moderate magnitude on later willingness to comply with a much larger request were examined. It was predicted that Ss exposed to a moderate initial request would be more likely to comply with the later, large, request than those exposed to only a small initial request, and that individu...
Article
Six groups of Ss, based on combinations of two levels of F scale scores and three levels of confederate risk-taking, took part in a game where they made decisions about accepting known outcomes or gambling on unknown alternatives. Results indicated that an individual’s behavior is significantly influenced by another’s responses in this situation. H...
Article
Full-text available
While creating and running new ventures, entrepreneurs are exposed to conditions known to generate high levels of stress (e.g., rapid change, unpredictable environments, work overload, personal responsibility for others). Thus, it has been assumed that they often experience intense stress. A markedly different possibility, however, is suggested by...
Article
What factors lead some individuals, but not others, to start new ventures? Early efforts to answer this question in terms of the personal characteristics of entrepreneurs met with only modest success. Thus, recent research has often focused, instead, on the cognitive factors that play a role in this process. The present study sought to add to this...
Article
Previous research indicates that improvisation—the deliberate extemporaneous composition and execution of novel action—is a key form of entrepreneurial behavior. It has been argued, however, that entrepreneurs’ improvisational behavior does not necessarily result in performance gains for their firms. Instead, a contingency perspective suggests that...
Article
An experiment was conducted to investigate the effects of locus of control instructions and reinforcement contingency on performance in a two-choice situation. Results indicated that Ss made significantly more correct responses under reinforcement for dominant than non-dominant responses, but that contrary to the results of previous experiments, lo...
Article
Forty-eight undergraduate males participated in an experiment designed to investigate the effects of magnitude of apparent pain shown by a live peer model on O reaction time (RT). It was hypothesized that the degree of emotional arousal vicariously induced among Ss would increase as the magnitude of pain cues emitted by the model increased. Thus, i...
Article
This paper explores the role of ‘affective attachment’ (powerful, emotional attachment) to one's ideas as a source of bias in market entry decisions concerning, but not limited to, technological initiatives. We investigated the effects of such attachment on: evaluations of new ideas and the idea developers’ desire to retain control over the commerc...
Article
'Enhancing Entrepreneurial Excellence is a fascinating and valuable treatise on how entrepreneurs achieve the transformation of an idea into a product that is successful in the marketplace. It is practical but well-grounded in the academic research. The book explains the tools that entrepreneurs need to be successful and displays the passion of the...
Article
Some managers and entrepreneurs decide to act in ways that result in harm to the natural environment, despite the fact that such actions violate their own values. Building on moral self-regulation theory (Bandura, 1991), we propose that entrepreneurs' assessments of the attractiveness of opportunities that harm the natural environment depend on the...
Article
This study applied affective events theory (AET) as a framework for understanding the relationship between the shared authentic leadership of new venture top management teams (TMTs) and the performance of their firms. Results, based on a national (United States) random sample of new ventures, demonstrated a positive indirect effect of shared authen...
Article
Previous research indicates that dispositional positive affect (DPA) is related to many beneficial outcomes (e.g., enhanced career success, development of high-quality social networks, improved performance on many tasks). Past research, however, has not directly investigated three crucial issues: (1) Are there limits to these beneficial effects? (2...
Article
Innovation is often a crucial ingredient in new venture success but at present, we know relatively little about the role of individual entrepreneurs in encouraging its occurrence. The present research addressed this issue by investigating the joint effects, on firm-level innovation, of two variables pertaining to entrepreneurs (their creativity and...
Article
In recent years, many companies have established virtual customer environments (VCEs) that offer facilities ranging from online discussion forums to virtual product design centers to partner with their customers in product development and product support activities. In this study, we focus on one form of VCE, online customer forums, and propose tha...
Article
Most new ventures fail, but a few prosper and attain rapid growth. Many factors contribute to such outcomes, but we propose that among these are mechanisms identified by cognitive science research on the origins of expert performance. Literature on this topic indicates that across many fields (e.g., medicine, science, sports, music), outstanding pe...
Article
The present study examined the relationship between the shared authentic leadership behavior of new venture top management teams (TMTs) and the performance of their firms. Consistent with predictions, findings from a national (United States) random sample of new ventures demonstrated that positive team affective tone mediated the indirect relations...
Article
Full-text available
How do feelings influence the effort of entrepreneurs? To obtain data on this issue, the authors implemented experience sampling methodology in which 46 entrepreneurs used cell phones to provide reports on their affect, future temporal focus, and venture effort twice daily for 24 days. Drawing on the affect-as-information theory, the study found th...
Article
The preceding paper by Wiltbank et al. reports that highly successful and experienced entrepreneurs rely, to a greater degree than novices (MBA students), on effectual logic. This finding raises a key question: Why do these two groups differ? The authors imply that this difference is the result of entrepreneurs' experience in starting new ventures....
Article
Full-text available
ABSTRACT Previous research indicates that entrepreneurs are generally high in dispositional optimism—the tendency to expect positive outcomes,even when such expectations are not rationally justified. The present research investigates the effects of such optimism and finds that in general, there is a negative relationship between entrepreneurs’ opti...
Article
Full-text available
An increasing number of firms are hosting virtual customer environments (VCEs) to involve their customers in product development and product support activities. While the benefits to companies from hosting such VCEs are clear, another closely related issue has received far less attention: Why do customers participate voluntarily in value cocreation...
Article
This research seeks to extend previous findings concerning the relationship between entrepreneurs' social skills and new venture performance. Two potential mediators of such effects (entrepreneurs' success in obtaining information and essential resources) were investigated, and data were collected in a culture not included in previous studies (Chin...
Article
Research on cognitive fit suggests that entrepreneurs will be most successful at leading their firms when approaching the entrepreneurial process through the self-regulatory mode that most closely matches the requirements of their environment and its accompanying perspective on the nature of entrepreneurial opportunities. Consistent with the discov...
Article
Research findings indicate that the feelings and moods individuals experience (i.e., their affect) influence many aspects of cognition and behavior. Extending these findings to entrepreneurship, I suggest that affect influences several aspects of en- trepreneurs' cognition and, hence, important elements of the entrepreneurial process. I propose a t...
Article
The entrepreneurial self-efficacy of lead founders has been generally considered to be a robust predictor of the performance of their firms. Few studies, however, have considered variables that might moderate this relationship. The current study attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining two possible moderators of the effects of entre...
Article
Full-text available
Virtual customer environments (VCE), which provide services ranging from online discussion forums to virtual design toolkits, enable firms to involve their customers in innovation and value creation. Evidently, companies can benefit from operating such VCEs; however, most firms do not seem to attach sufficient importance to the nature of customers'...
Article
Entrepreneurs play a central role in new venture creation. Because they do, careful attention to relevant aspects of their behavior and cognition can offer useful insights into key aspects of this complex process. Specifically, investigation of carefully selected behavioral and cognitive factors can add appreciably to our understanding of the basic...
Article
The effects of two values held by founder—CEOs (collectivism and novelty) on companies' post—start-up performance are investigated. By integrating congruence and organizational lifecycle literatures, the authors hypothesized that the effects of both values are moderated by company age and size, such that collectivism exerts stronger beneficial effe...
Article
Effects on opportunity recognition of three social sources of opportunity-related information (mentors, informal industry networks, participation in professional forums) were investigated. Results indicated that all three sources had direct, positive effects on opportunity recognition by entrepreneurs. In addition, the effects of two sources (mento...
Article
It is suggested that the recognition of new business opportunities often involves pattern recognition--the cognitive process through which individuals identify meaningful patterns in complex arrays of events or trends. Basic research on pattern recognition indicates that cognitive frameworks acquired through experience (e.g., prototypes) play a cen...
Article
Male and female subjects interviewed female applicants for an entry-level management position. The applicants were actually confederates of the researcher who engaged or did not engage in two different tactics of self-presentation: the emission of many positive nonverbal cues and the use of one popular grooming aid (perfume). It was predicted that...
Article
One hundred and twenty passing motorists were delayed for 15 sec at an intersection by a confederate who failed to move his vehicle after the light turned green. Prior to such annoyance, subjects in three groups were exposed to experimental treatments designed to cause them to experience reactions incompatible with anger or overt aggression (i.e.,...
Article
Male and female subjects interviewed a same-sex applicant for an entry-level management position. In reality, this person was an accomplice who presented a carefully standardized pattern of positive and negative information. Prior to the interview, participants were exposed to treatments designed to place them in a positive, neutral, or negative mo...
Article
Participants were induced to experience positive affect, negative affect, or no shift in current affect. Then they conducted a simulated job interview with an applicant (actually an assistant) who appeared to be highly qualified, ambiguously qualified, or unqualified for the job in question. It was predicted that interviewers’ moods would exert the...
Article
Sixty-four undergraduate males received either very postive or very negative personal evaluations from an attitudinally similar or dissimilar stranger, and were then given an opportunity to aggress against this person by means of electric shock. Half were exposed to these stimuli under comfortably cool environmental conditions, while half were so t...
Article
Male and female undergraduates interacted with a same-sex experimenter and a same-sex assistant of the experimenter. Either the experimenter or the assistant smoked. Subjects were provoked or not provoked by the experimenter and then smoked. Subjects were provoked or not provided by the experimenter and then provided with an opportunity to treat hi...
Article
Male and female subjects performed several tasks either in the presence or absence of an environmental source of positive affect (pleasant artificial scents produced by two commercially manufactured air-fresheners). Consistent with the findings of previous research on the impact of positive affect, results indicated that several aspects of subjects...
Article
Two studies were conducted to investigate the potential effects on workrelated behavior of one environmental variable: pleasant fragrances. In Study 1, participants performed a word construction task under low or high stress while in the presence or absence of pleasant fragrances. Performance was significantly enhanced by fragrance in both stress c...
Article
Sixty-four white undergraduate males participated in an experiment designed to examine the effects of victin's pain cues, victim's racial identity, and level of prior instigation upon physical aggression. On the basis of previous research, it was tentatively predicted that pain cues from a different-race victim would exert less influence upon subje...
Article
One hundred and sixty undergraduates (80 males, 80 females) participated in a field experiment designed to examine the influence of invasions of personal space and sex of requester upon subsequent helping. On the basis of previous research, it was predicted that helping would be markedly inhibited by invasions of personal space, and that the magnit...
Article
Entrepreneurship researchers have recently drawn heavily on the theories and findings of social psychology. The present research sought to add to this growing literature by investigating effects of entrepreneurs' attractiveness. In Study 1, participants read descriptions of ideas for new products accompanied by photos of the entrepreneurs who osten...
Article
How do entrepreneurs identify opportunities for new business ventures? One possibility, suggested by research on human cognition, is that they do so by using cognitive frameworks they have acquired through experience to perceive connections between seemingly unrelated events or trends in the external world. In other words, they use cognitive framew...
Article
The odds are strongly against entrepreneurs. Most new ventures fail and only a tiny proportion attain success. Yet, a small number of entrepreneurs found companies that achieve truly exceptional outcomes. What factors contribute to such results? It is suggested that useful insights into this question may be gained from basic research on expert perf...
Article
Full-text available
New business formation is a formidable and daunting task, which may require personal perseverance and self-efficacy. If this is indeed the case, will entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs differ on such attributes? Also, if high levels of perseverance and self-efficacy help entrepreneurs to overcome setbacks, snags, and obstacles, do these positive a...
Article
Several measures and methods developed by the field of cognitive science may prove useful to researchers investigating various aspects of entrepreneurial cognition. These techniques include ones that have not, as yet, been applied to entrepreneurial cognition, such as reaction time, priming, measures of working memory, and measures of creative cogn...
Article
Full-text available
Socially competent entrepreneurs are likely to gain access to more or better information, generate enthusiasm among venture capitalists, or attract employees or customers. Our study examines the perceptions entrepreneurs have about their own social competence and compares these perceptions to assessments of outsiders. Sixty-six entrepreneurs seekin...
Article
A model is proposed that relates opportunity recognition to pattern recognition—the process through which individuals perceive emergent patterns among seemingly unrelated stimuli or events. This model suggests that because of their unique knowledge structures (e.g., prototypes, exemplars), specific persons perceive patterns among emerging changes i...
Article
Given the lack of unequivocal findings on person-career fit, this investigation aims to gain insight into the role of cognitive styles in understanding students’ career preferences by two complementary studies. In study 1, we examined whether students (n = 84) with different cognitive styles differ in their entrepreneurial attitudes. Results showed...
Article
Entrepreneurship is a highly complex process influenced by an enormous range of variables. In view of these facts, it seems reasonable to suggest that entrepreneurship, as a field, can benefit greatly from expanding the array of conceptual tools at its disposal. The cognitive perspective provides a potentially rich source of such tools. Consistent...
Article
New business formation is a formidable and daunting task, which may require personal perseverance and self-efficacy. If this is indeed the case, will entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs differ on such attributes? Also, if high levels of perseverance and self-efficacy help entrepreneurs to overcome setbacks, snags, and obstacles, do these positive a...
Article
Full-text available
Person–organization fit research suggests that the closer the match between individuals' attitudes, values, knowledge, skills, abilities, and personality, the better their job satisfaction and performance. We suggest that the closer the match between entrepreneurs' personal characteristics and the requirements of being an entrepreneur (e.g., creati...
Article
Full-text available
This study contrasts community violence and an organization's procedural justice climate (or lack thereof) as explanations for employee-instigated workplace aggression in the geographically dispersed plants of a nationwide organization. The findings showed that violent crime rates in the community where a plant resided predicted workplace aggressio...
Article
Decision-making processes employed by venture capitalists (VCs) varying in experience were compared. Results show that for relatively inexperienced VCs, increasing experience is associated with improvements in reliability and performance relative to a benchmark (a bootstrapping model). Beyond a specific point, however, further gains in experience a...
Article
Full-text available
This research assesses two individual differences—general self-efficacy and regretful thinking—in the context of technological innovation. Results, obtained from a random sample of 217 patent inventors show that both general self-efficacy and regretful thinking distinguish inventors who started a business (i.e., technological entrepreneurs) from in...
Article
Full-text available
Two studies investigated the hypothesis that the higher entrepreneurs' social competence (their ability to interact effectively with others as based on discrete social skills), the greater their financial success. Entrepreneurs working in two different industries (cosmetics and high-tech) completed a questionnaire designed to measure several aspect...
Article
One widely accepted definition of the field entrepreneurship (Venkataraman, 1997, p. 6) suggests that it is “A scholarly field that seeks to understand how opportunities to bring into existence ‘future’ goods and services are discovered, created, and exploited, by whom, and with what consequences.” This definition indicates that entrepreneurship in...
Article
Full-text available
It was hypothesized that perceptions of women who become entrepreneurs are enhanced by attributional augmenting because they adopt this role despite major obstacles to doing so. In contrast, attributional augmenting was expected to operate to a lesser degree for men who become entrepreneurs because they presumably face weaker obstacles. Three studi...
Article
The literature on organizational justice has identified 3 key components of this process: distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. On the basis of fairness heuristic theory, we reasoned that employees may use perceptions of these 3 components as a basis for drawing inferences about the fairness of the organization as a whole (i.e., thei...
Conference Paper
Technological advances that provide hundreds of millions of persons with valuable new tools for performing their jobs also arm them with new means of aggressing against others. We describe aggression through these new electronic means as cyber aggression, because one meaning of the term "cyber" is "computer-generated;" and this, in turn, seems an a...
Article
What factors lead some individuals, but not others, to start new ventures? Early efforts to answer this question in terms of the personal characteristics of entrepreneurs met with only modest success. Thus, recent research has often focused, instead, on the cognitive factors that play a role in this process. The present study sought to add to this...
Article
Full-text available
Why are some entrepreneurs so much more successful than others in starting new ventures? Previous efforts to answer this question have generally focused either on the personality traits or susceptibility to various cognitive errors of individual entrepreneurs, or on such external factors as the number of competing businesses. We suggest that entrep...
Article
Full-text available
Executive Overview Why are some entrepreneurs so much more successful than others in starting new ventures? Previous efforts to answer this question have generally focused either on the personality traits or susceptibility to various cognitive errors of individual entrepreneurs, or on such external factors as the number of competing businesses. We...
Article
Full-text available
Previous research in corporate entrepreneurship found that selecting the right executive champion and requesting moderate initial funding was strongly correlated with start-up funding. Utilizing credible teams was found to be an important factor for projects receiving over $1,000,000. However, understanding the cognitive abilities of the individual...
Article
Four hundred fifty-two employed persons rated the frequency with which they had been the victims of a wide range of aggressive actions at work. In addition, they also rated the frequency with which they themselves had aggressed against others in their workplaces. Three hypotheses were investigated: (1) covert forms of aggression, in which aggressor...
Conference Paper
The objective of this study was to empirically examine how the management style of the team leader effects the internal dynamics of a cross-functional product development team (CFPDT). Results of a correlation analysis indicate that facilitative behavior (considerate and participative management style) of a team leader had a tremendous influence on...
Article
Full-text available
Are threats and assaults by employees a reflection of aggression found in society at large, or of management practices (procedural injustice), or both? Analyses of large-scale longitudinal data showed that local violent crime rates predicted both workplace threats and assaults. Organizational climates of procedural injustice predicted assaults but...
Article
Eighty undergraduates performed a simulated driving task that required them to keep a moving target within defined boundaries (compensatory tracking); they also performed this task while responding to randomly occurring visual stimuli (stop signs). They performed these tasks in the presence or absence of a pleasant fragrance and after receiving or...
Article
Because of their importance in creating wealth—both personal and societal—entrepreneurs have long been the subject of intensive study. Past research has focused on important issues such as: Why do some people, but not others, recognize or create new opportunities? Why do some, but not others, try to convert their ideas and dreams into business vent...
Article
Full-text available
Contrary to the impression generated by an increasing number of news reports in the past several years, the occurrence of workplace violencemextreme acts of aggression involving direct physical assault represents a relatively rare event in work settings. However, workplace aggression--efforts by individuals to harm others with whom they work or hav...
Article
Because of their importance in creating wealth—both personal and societal—entrepreneurs have long been the subject of intensive study. Past research has focused on important issues such as: Why do some people, but not others, recognize or create new opportunities? Why do some, but not others, try to convert their ideas and dreams into business vent...

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