Coping with anxiety in the entrepreneurial process

Abstract

Several studies have argued or established that negative emotions can facilitate as well as hinder entrepreneurial goal achievement, and a number of scholars have called for more in-depth investigations of the nature, origins and dynamics of negative emotions during the entrepreneurship process. Using open-ended, vignette and graphical elicitation interviews with 77 entrepreneurs, in this paper we inductively investigate the sources of and coping responses to anxiety throughout the entrepreneurship process. We contribute to the literature by: building on the seminal work of Cacciotti et al. (2016) by explicitly connecting the sources of anxieties to goal striving behavior theories; developing and finding evidence for a dynamic and comprehensive model of coping responses by integrating appraisal and control theories; exposing the dynamics of anxiety over the entrepreneurial process; and clarifying the competing concepts of anxiety and fear of failure in existing literature.