Ute Stephan

King's College London | KCL · Department of Management

This paper is a cross-national study testing a framework relating cultural descriptive norms to entrepreneurship in a sample of 40 nations. Based on data from the GLOBE project, we identify two higher-order dimensions of culture - socially-supportive culture (SSC) and performance-based culture (PBC) - and relate them to entrepreneurship rates and a...

We develop the institutional configuration perspective to understand which national contexts facilitate social entrepreneurship (SE). We confirm joint effects on SE of formal regulatory (government activism), informal cognitive (postmaterialist cultural values), and informal normative (socially supportive cultural norms, or weak-tie social capital)...

Academic and practitioner interest in how market-based organizations can drive positive social change (PSC) is steadily growing. This paper helps to recast how organizations relate to society. It integrates research on projects stimulating PSC—the transformational processes to advance societal well-being—that is fragmented across different streams...

Interest in entrepreneurs' mental health and well-being (MWB) is growing in recognition of the role of MWB in entrepreneurs' decision-making, motivation and action. Yet relevant knowledge is dispersed across disciplines, which makes it unclear what we currently understand about entrepreneurs' MWB. In this systematic review I integrate insights from...

Entrepreneurship can be fulfilling and enhance wellbeing, but also highly stressful and diminish wellbeing. This meta-analytical review synthesizes 319 effect sizes from 94 studies and 82 countries to establish whether individuals derive greater wellbeing from working for themselves or for someone else. The answer is partly positive in favor of ent...

This chapter first reviews individual-level perspectives on how entrepreneurs navigate uncertainty in research on entrepreneurial action and research on entrepreneurial wellbeing, respectively. I then integrate these perspectives to outline a micro-level self-regulatory model of entrepreneurs' uncertainty management. This model considers cognitive...

Why do some entrepreneurs pivot their business models in a crisis, while others are more passive? Integrating Conservation of Resources theory with work on crisis rumination, we developed a micro-level model to explain why entrepreneurs who are under strain due to a crisis, as indicated by experiencing crisis rumination, adopt an active approach –...

Entrepreneurs are often depicted as lone heroes. However , they are encouraged to seek and use feedback from their social environment to refine their venture ideas and enhance performance. Surprisingly, systematic research on entrepreneurs' feedback-seeking is in its infancy, and this nascent research is marked by conceptual vagueness about the fee...

This paper aims to enhance our understanding of work and wellbeing in the entrepreneurial society. We integrate research on proactive personality (PP) and job design to explore how entrepreneurs' PP impacts their employees' job satisfaction by shaping employee job design in a multi-source multilevel study of 43 entrepreneurs/firms and 511 of their...

This special issue of Personnel Psychology is devoted to micro‐based research on entrepreneurship, an emerging field that heretofore has been highly influenced by scholars in economics, strategy, and sociology. A theme of this special issue is that to further advance research on entrepreneurship, we need to develop a greater understanding of the ro...

Plain English Summary Entrepreneurship research questions the core assumptions of other academic fields and legitimizes them both practically and academically. Since the 1980s, entrepreneurship research has seen tremendous growth and development, establishing itself as an academic field. Entrepreneurship is also taught extensively in leading busine...

How can entrepreneurs protect their wellbeing during a crisis? Does engaging agility (namely, opportunity agility and planning agility) in response to adversity help entrepreneurs safeguard their wellbeing? Activated by adversity, agility may function as a specific resilience mechanism enabling positive adaption to crisis. We studied 3,162 entrepre...

The developmental psychology literature has linked childhood adversities to detrimental development outcomes that can undermine labor market participation and performance. In contrast, emerging entrepreneurship studies raise the possibility that childhood adversities may positively affect entrepreneurial action with some diverging findings. We reco...

Call for Papers for a Special Issue “Mental Health, Well-being, and Entrepreneurship” Submission deadline: January 2024, BRQ Business Research Quarterly, Guest editors Daniel Lerner, Ana Pérez-Luño, Ute Stephan, Johan Wiklund. For understandable reasons, hitherto most published work on entrepreneurship and wellbeing has prioritized interesting res...

Zusammenfassung Ukraine-Krieg, wirtschaftliche Folgen der Pandemie, Klimawandel, Strukturwandel – die Familienunternehmen in Europa stehen aktuell vor der Bewältigung vieler Herausforderungen. Wie können sie diese meistern? Und wie kann die Mittelstandspolitik sie hierbei unterstützen? Auf Basis ihrer jeweiligen wissenschaftlichen Forschungsergebni...

We advance research on social entrepreneurship by offering a constraint-based individual perspective of “who” (gender, education) chooses to create social value “when” in their life course (proxied by age). Integrating predictions from situational strength theory in psychology and the life course perspective in sociology, we theorize that resource...

During new venture creation, entrepreneurs make decisions in a variety of areas from seeking funding to hiring employees. When and why entrepreneurs use effectual or causal logics to make such decisions is poorly understood. In this study, we integrate ecological rationality theory and effectuation theory to examine how the nature of decisions infl...

online supplement file for Stephan, U., Zbierowski, P., Pérez-Luño, A., Wach, D., Wiklund, J., Alba Cabañas, M., Barki, E., Benzari, A., Bernhard-Oettel, C., Boekhorst, J.A., Dash, A., Efendic, A., Eib, C., Hanard, P.-J., Iakovleva, T., Kawakatsu, S., Khalid, S., Leatherbee, M., Li, J., Parker, S.K., Qu, J., Rosati, F., Sahasranamam, S., Sekiguchi...

How can culture help explain persistent cross-country differences in innovation and entrepreneurship? This overview of cross-cultural innovation/entrepreneurship research draws on the most prominent cultural frameworks (by Hofstede, Schwartz, GLOBE, and Gelfand and colleagues). After outlining similarities and differences between these frameworks,...

This special issue introduces a set of papers that contribute to research on leadership and health/well-being from multiple perspectives. To situate these papers in current research debates, this introduction to the special issue provides an overview of research on leadership and health/well-being by using a microscope-macroscope perspective as an...

Entrepreneurship is uniquely stressful. Entrepreneurs often cannot avoid entrepreneurial stressors (e.g., uncertainty, workload, resource constraints) and these stressors can deter natural recovery activities (e.g., detachment and sleep). Yet, entrepreneurs may be able to lessen the negative impact of stress on their well-being, health, and product...

Social entrepreneurs need resources to develop their organizations and catalyze social impact. Existing research focuses on how social entrepreneurs access and use resources, yet it neglects how they search for resource holders. This issue is particularly salient in social entrepreneurs’ decisions about whom to approach for interpersonal feedback a...

Research on entrepreneurial cognition and uncertainty has existed for decades, yet most empirical studies have not integrated methods or concepts from neuroscience. To address this, we provide a framework to unpack the micro-foundations of entrepreneurial cognition. Leveraging theories of cognitive control we show how novel actions are produced, an...

This study advances understanding of interpersonal feedback seeking as a relational micro-foundational process whereby social entrepreneurs proactively involve others in venturing and engage in sensemaking when this fails. Our inductive analysis of 82 interviews with 36 social entrepreneurs reveals the agency in and the plurality and precariousness...

This is Stata dataset used for: Mickiewicz, T., Stephan, U. & Shami, M. (2021). The consequences of short-term institutional change in the rule of law for entrepreneurship, Global Strategy Journal, DOI: 10.1002/gsj.1413

This is online appendix for Mickiewicz, T., Stephan, U., Shami, M. (2021), The consequences of short-term institutional change in the rule of law for entrepreneurship, Global Strategy Journal, DOI: 10.1002/gsj.1413

This is Stata Do file for Mickiewicz, T., Stephan, U. & Shami, M. (2021) The consequences of short-term institutional change in the rule of law for entrepreneurship, Global Strategy Journal, DOI: 10.1002/gsj.1413

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all walks of human life be it economic, health, social or mental well-being. The nationwide lock-down for over two months and subsequent easing of restrictions over multiple months in 2020 has put significant stress on the Indian Micro-Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), which contribute nearly one-third of Indi...

Research Summary Past research views institutions as stable and slow to change and uses institutional differences to explain cross-national variation in entrepreneurship. This article introduces a new perspective to institutional theory, that of short-term institutional change. Integrating insights from cognitive science allows us to theorize not j...

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs including the selfemployed) account for 90% of businesses globally and provide 70% of employment worldwide. These businesses, typically entrepreneur led, are threatened by the Covid-19 pandemic, meaning that millions of jobs are at risk. This report presents insights from a global study conducted during the...

While academic research on recovery was rather segregated between occupational health psychology and management research at the beginning of the 20s century and streams of research developed independently, recent developments hint at a closing divide and better integration of recovery research across disciplines. This for example becomes evident in...

The past decade has experienced a significant increase in the number of papers on the biology of entrepreneurship. This trend is aligned with the general interest in the biology of management studies as evidenced by the more than 300 articles already published (Nofal et al., 2018). It illustrates the progression of science along two dimensions. Fir...

HIGHLIGHTS Often social entrepreneurs (SEs) come from privileged backgrounds to work on challenges of disadvantage. Encouraging social entrepreneurs directly from and in disadvantaged areas is important also. We outline an ecosystem approach to foster SEs directly in disadvantaged areas. This systems approach address both the micro and the macro le...

This report contains insights from a study of UK entrepreneurs and SMEs that captured their situation during the first nationwide lockdown to control the Covid-19 pandemic (May-July 2020). It also reflects how impacts differed for women and men entrepreneurs and those located in and outside of London. We capture entrepreneurs’ long-term outlook bey...

This study investigates why and where self-employment is related to higher levels of eudaimonic well-being. We focus on meaningfulness as an important eudaimonic process and subjective vitality as a eudaimonic well-being outcome that is central to entrepreneurs' proactivity. Building on self-determination theory, we posit that self-employment, rela...

Firm performance is typically measured via objective financial indicators. However, researchers increasingly acknowledge that entrepreneurs do not measure their success solely in financial terms but that a range of often subjective indicators matter to them. This article contributes to the debate on entrepreneurial performance by studying how entre...

This introduction to the special issue outlines key issues in research on inclusion—as the process of recognizing individual’s needs for both belonging and distinctiveness. Whereas past research often focuses on diversity in relation to discrimination, this special issue attempts to offer a positive lens and asks how we can build inclusive societie...

Today’s societies face grand challenges, many of them global in scope. They range from environmental climate change and digitalization to ecosystem disruption and dramatic upsurge of socially divisive forces. The scale, difficulty, non-linear dynamics and complexities of these transition problems are such that no one entity, discipline or social se...

Purpose Past research on self-employment and health yielded conflicting findings. Integrating predictions from the Stressor-Strain Outcome model, research on challenge stressors and allostatic load, we predict that physical and mental health are affected by self-employment in distinct ways which play out over different time horizons. We also test w...

A brief editorial reflecting on retractions, especially those initiated by authors.

Although entrepreneurs are said to have extremely stressful work, how they may be able to maintain their well-being in light of this is only poorly understood. Newly integrating the challenge-hindrance stressor framework with the stressor-detachment model of recovery from work stress, we investigate how specific challenge and hindrance stressors—co...

Occupational stress has been shown as a major risk for workers’ physical and mental health and mortality. Leaders play an important role in shaping the work environment and their behaviors are often associated with their subordinates’ health/well-being (Arnold, 2017) but also their own well-being (Kaluza, Boer, Buengeler, & Van Dick, 2019). Althoug...

This editorial draws attention to time to advance entrepreneurship research by focusing on two aspects of time-time perspective and time management. We initiate a deeper conversation on time in entrepreneurship and illustrate the value of a time-based lens for entrepreneurship research through discussing examples at the individual, firm and context...

Integrating insights from the strategic goal literature and the knowledge‐based view of the firm, this study proposes that the pursuit of social and economic strategic goals by commercial firms affects their innovation performance through different knowledge‐sourcing activities. The strategic goals, knowledge‐sourcing practices, and innovation perf...

In this introduction to the lead article on “Values at Work”, I summarize key points made in the lead article and its commentaries including those relating to the mechanisms and boundary conditions of value‐behavior relationships. I highlight links with the organizational and management literature, which pays increasing attention to the role of val...

There is limited understanding of the precise circumstances under which environmental actions—such as environmental innovation—contribute to firm performance. Building on the resource-based view and on stakeholder theory, this study argues that the general positive effect of environmental innovation on financial performance varies significantly wit...

The conceptualization of destructive leadership has received increasing attention in recent times. Accordingly, researchers have developed a theoretical model of destructive leadership that highlights two manifestations as follows: (1) leading followers towards goals that contradict the organization’s interests and (2) the use of harmful methods in...

The level of entrepreneurial activity is higher in emerging markets than in developed economies, driven by high levels of necessity entry and less daunting entry barriers, especially in the informal sector. However, a gap remains in our understanding of its extent and of the drivers of its change. This chapter addresses this gap by conceptualizing...

Blog post in the LSE Business Review http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2018/04/12/rest-and-constructive-thinking-feed-entrepreneurs-creativity/

Researchers are becoming increasingly interested in the use of transformational leadership theory in higher education teaching (often referred to as transformational instructor-leadership). Much of this body of research investigates a direct association between transformational instructor-leadership and student outcomes. In the present study, we ta...

Prior research has shown that trait creativity is important for becoming an entrepreneur and successful in business. We explore a new perspective by investigating how recovery from work stress influences entrepreneurs' daily idea generation, a key aspect of creativity. Physiological and mental recovery enables the cognitive processes of creative pr...

Social enterprises – organisations that use market based-based activities to alleviate societal needs – and social entrepreneurs –individuals working for their own account to pursue prosocial goals to benefit others – work to address societal challenges such as social inequalities and exclusion. But how can social enterprises be a force for greater...

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) jointly commissioned a report focused on improving the methodology, which allows identification of social enterprises in the UK small business population. Based on this improved methodology and a dedicated survey of a r...

This chapter presents a systematic review of 50 empirical studies on the social entrepreneurial personality. It aims to answer the question of who social entrepreneurs are in order to help understand why certain individuals but not others create social ventures and persist in their choice. The review findings reveal a focus on four distinct aspects...

Integrating predictions from the theory of human values with the theory of planned behavior (TPB), our primary goal is to investigate mechanisms through which individual values are related to entrepreneurial career intentions using a sample of 823 students from four European countries. We find that openness and self-enhancement values relate positi...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of employee innovative behavior conceptualizing it as distinct from innovation outputs and as a multi-faceted behavior rather than a simple count of “innovative acts” by employees. It understands individual employee innovative behaviors as a micro-foundation of firm intrapreneurship that is e...

We investigate the effects of organizational culture and personal values on performance under individual and team contest incentives. We develop a model of regard for others and in-group favoritism that predicts interaction effects between organizational values and personal values in contest games. These predictions are tested in a computerized lab...

We present a systematic review of 50 empirical studies on the social entrepreneurial personality. We aim to answer 'who social entrepreneurs are' to help understand why certain individuals but not others create social ventures and persist in their choice. The review findings reveal a focus on four distinct aspects of personality: motivations, trait...

This article conceptualises and operationalizes ‘subjective entrepreneurial success’ in a manner which reflects the criteria employed by entrepreneurs, rather than those imposed by researchers. Using two studies, a first qualitative enquiry investigated success definitions using interviews with 185 German entrepreneurs; five factors emerged from th...