THE RELATIONSIP BETWEEN ENTREPRENEUR S LEVEL OF PERCEIVED BUSINESS-RELATED FEAR AND BUSINESS PERFORMANCE

Abstract

There is increasing awareness about fear's effect on the quality of human performance in the workplace (Briksin, 1996; Garcia-Zamor, 2003; Gerst, 1995). In the light of this proposition, improving the entrepreneur's capability to manage his or her own fears may have a high probability of increasing business performance. An expected outcome of this study is that if fear affects workplace behavior and play a significant role in workplace performance, then it would be important for entrepreneurs to understand how fear can limit their business success. Fear of the entrepreneur's results for business performance has very few studied empirically (Collins, 2007). This study adds to the body of knowledge by exploring the fears of entrepreneurs and the relationship of fear and business performance. The result of study is valuable for both academia and practitioners. The article proceeds in the following manner. First, we briefly review the literature regarding fear in the workplace, entrepreneurship and results for business performance. We develop hypotheses concerning the relationship between entrepreneur's the level of perceived business-related fear on business performance. Next, we test our hypotheses using data from 255 enterprises owner from various scale firms (micro-small-medium sized and corporate firms) in Istanbul. In this study various valuable demographic description which is supported by literature is done for the participated enterprise owners. And findings of regression analyzes indicated that as a fear dimension "fear of legal issues" is a supported dimension with the association with both financial and innovative performance.