Influences of Entrepreneurs’ Affect and Self-esteem on Escalation of Commitment

Abstract

The entrepreneurial environment is changing rapidly and uncertain, in which risks and opportunities coexist. Entrepreneurs may gain success, fortune, reputation and status, but also may encounter setback and failure. Sometimes, entrepreneurs will encounter the dilemma of whether to persist to invest to a failing action in entrepreneurial process, and are easy to have the decision-making tendency of escalation of commitment. Escalation of commitment is a typical decision - making and judgment bias occurring in entrepreneurial process, which will directly impact the success and failure of entrepreneurship. In this study, the escalation of commitment is explored from the aspects of entrepreneurs’ affect and self-esteem, for which the experimental methods are adopted to have investigation on entrepreneurs, and the results show that there is significance difference in escalation of commitment among entrepreneurs with high self-esteem level and entrepreneurs with medium self-esteem level, and entrepreneurs with medium self-esteem level are more tend to escalation of commitment than entrepreneurs with high self-esteem level.

Keywords: entrepreneurs, affect, self-esteem, escalation of commitment