Traits and Trust: Exploring Startups’ Response to Critical Sense-Breaking Feedback
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2024-07-03
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en
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Abstract
This study explores how three personal characteristics—self-esteem, psychological ownership, and cognitive dissonance—influence startup entrepreneurs' response to sense-breaking critical feedback. Furthermore, it explores whether the entrepreneurs' trust in the feedback giver moderates these relationships. Deductive quantitative research is used to answer the research question and hypotheses that were derived from theory. Existing measurement scales were used for the personal traits variables, and new measurement scales were made for entrepreneurial response and trust to fit the context of this study.
The findings suggest that cognitive dissonance is the only significant predictor of entrepreneurial response, indicating that higher levels of cognitive dissonance lead to more negative entrepreneurial responses like ignoring feedback, avoidance behavior, escalation, and seeking confirmation from others. Self-esteem and psychological ownership did not show significant effects on the entrepreneurial response. Additionally, trust did not moderate the relationships between personal characteristics and entrepreneurial response. However, the results should be considered with caution since the factor analysis shows an unclear structure for the personal traits, especially psychological ownership, which also does not meet the threshold for the reliability analysis. Nevertheless, this research contributes to the literature by highlighting the influence of cognitive dissonance on entrepreneurial response while receiving critical sense-breaking feedback, thereby indicating the insignificance of trust when the feedback becomes sense-breaking and critical.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen