Brandon Mueller’s research while affiliated with Iowa State University and other places

Goal-setting theory suggests that difficult goals enhance performance on many tasks. When goals are so difficult as to be unattainable, however, they 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 tend to set goals that cannot be achieved. We reason that self-control, one important aspect of self-regulation, may restrain this tendency and encourage entrepreneurs to set goals that, although difficult, are also attainable. Results offer support for this hypothesis. Goal-setting theory also predicts a positive relationship between goal difficulty and performance. We suggest, and find, that this relationship is curvilinear: up to a point, increases in goal difficulty are positively related to performance, but beyond this point further increases in difficulty are negatively related to performance. Finally, we found that goal difficulty mediated the relationship between entrepreneurs’ self-efficacy and firm performance. The findings of this study contribute to current knowledge concerning the role of entrepreneurs’ self-regulation in the entrepreneurial process, and more broadly to goal-setting theory.

Passion is a commonly observed phenomenon in the entrepreneurial process. Entrepreneurs are known to be passionate, and their passion has been argued by scholars to be an important element in entrepreneurship. There have been ongoing discussions in the literature with regards to why passion might lead to successful new ventures. Yet, we have very limited understanding of how an entrepreneur’s passion impacts his or her behavior or how entrepreneurial passion translates into successful outcomes for the firm. Opportunity recognition has been recognized as a crucial first step in the entrepreneurial process. Before an entrepreneur can move towards exploiting an opportunity he or she must be alert and recognize opportunities. Alertness – the ability to scan for new opportunity, associate and connect disparate information, and evaluate whether the new information presents an opportunity – is thus a vital part of entrepreneurship. While significant progress has been made in exploring alertness from a cognitive perspective, explorations that focus on the motivational antecedents to alertness have been sparse. The current research seeks to address above gaps by investigating the antecedents of alertness and finds that passion acts as an indirect antecedent of alertness, with its effects mediated by proaction, learning goal orientation, and creativity.

How does entrepreneurial passion moderate key relationships between individual characteristics and overall firm performance? In this paper we examine how passion influences the relationship between goal setting, self- efficacy, and performance. We propose and test a passion-related model of individual influences on entrepreneurial firm performance. Our results provide evidence supporting the notion that passion does substantially moderate both the relationship between goal setting and performance as well as the relationship between self-efficacy and performance, although in strikingly different manners. The implications for current and future, as well as the limitations of the current study, are subsequently examined.

Although previous research has extolled the importance of business failure as a precursor to transformational learning, few studies have explored the conditions under which such learning occurs or the content of the resulting knowledge. We explore several cognitive moderators of the relationship between failure experiences and a specific type of opportunity identification knowledge—the use of structural alignment processes. Results indicate that learning from failure is facilitated for entrepreneurs who possess a cognitive toolset that consists of opportunity prototypes and an intuitive cognitive style. Moreover, we found that prior professional knowledge negatively moderates this relationship.

Failure has been consistently extolled as a fundamental learning experience in entrepreneurship. However, researchers acknowledge that this pervasive view of failure is supported in the literature almost solely on the basis of anecdotal evidence. This study empirically investigates the type of knowledge that can be learned through a failure experience as well as the factors that moderate the learning process. We find that business failure can help improve an entrepreneur's ability to recognize business opportunities by enhancing their use of structural alignment processes. This relationship is particularly strong for those entrepreneurs operating with an intuitive cognitive style, utilizing expert opportunity prototypes, and relying less upon prior professional experience.