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3661Entrepreneurial restart after failure belongs to high-quality entrepreneurship. As an emerging research topic, theoretical exploration and empirical evidence are still inadequate. In reality, it is common and frequent for entrepreneurs to restart all over again, investing time and energy to achieve success in the face of failure. As a behavior of entrepreneurial investment, entrepreneurial effort can help entrepreneurs realize their goals by seizing opportunities and rationally allocating resources. However, the existing knowledge on the motivation of entrepreneurial effort mainly considers from the external environment or the individual characteristics respectively, ignoring the integration of the two. Based on the “context – evaluation – response” logic line of the Cognitive Appraisal Theory of Emotion, a mediation model of social costs, fear of failure and entrepreneurial effort is constructed, and hypotheses are tested using serial entrepreneurs with prior failure experience as samples.
The conclusions are that: Social costs activate different types of fear of failure through evaluation patterns by the impact of failure cues. Compared with endogenous fear of failure, exogenous fear of failure is more likely to make entrepreneurs perceive the difference between progress and goal, thus generating entrepreneurial effort. Social costs do not directly affect entrepreneurial effort, but promote entrepreneurial effort through the intermediary mechanism of exogenous fear of failure. That is, exogenous fear of failure plays a complete mediating role between social costs and entrepreneurial effort.
The implications are as follows: First, entrepreneurs should rationally look at failure costs and its potential impact, escaping from the negative emotions caused by failure. Second, entrepreneurs should correctly understand the duality of fear of failure, making full use of the alertness brought about by exogenous fear of failure, and adjusting entrepreneurial goals according to their own resources and capabilities to make effective entrepreneurial effort. Third, entrepreneurship education should emphasize on training with regard to cognitive analysis and emotion management, helping entrepreneurs, especially those with failure experience, to promote high-quality entrepreneurial restart by stimulating entrepreneurial spirit and effort.
The contributions are as follows: First, based on the failure situation, this study explores the internal mechanism that affects entrepreneurial effort, and expands the contextual research on the formation of entrepreneurial effort from a micro perspective. Second, from the perspective of social costs of failure, this study analyzes the evaluation process of failure clues, and explores its impact mechanism on entrepreneurial effort, which enriches the knowledge on the impact of entrepreneurial failure on serial entrepreneurship. Third, most of the existing knowledge regards the fear of failure as a single structure. Based on the distinction among the dimensions of fear of failure, this study finds that social costs promote entrepreneurial effort through exogenous fear of failure, enriching the research on the formation and differential effects of fear of failure.
Based on the above analysis, future effort could be put into the analysis of the different formation paths of fear of failure due to different types of failure costs and the boundary conditions of social costs affecting entrepreneurial activities. Second-hand survey data could also be used to measure social costs, and combined with first-hand survey data to test the robustness of conclusions.
