Impression Management Strategies after Entrepreneurial Failure:Scale Development and Predictive Effects on Evaluative Legitimacy
Entrepreneurial failure often stigmatizes entrepreneurs and threatens their images.Impression management is a crucial communicative strategy for entrepreneurs to manage failure and gain legitimacy through telling"failure stories"to organizational audiences.This study aimed to explore the unique structure and connotation of impression management strategies after entrepreneurial failure and to elucidate the mechanisms how impression management strategies influence investors'evaluative legitimacy.This research collected entrepreneurs'initial narritives after entrepreneurial failure from media,and clarified the concept and develop a scale of impression management strategies after entrepreneurial failure.Then this study utilized exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to test the reliability and validity of the scale.The results show that entrepreneurs mainly adopt four types of impression management strategies:accepting responsibility,denying responsibility(including denying responsibility to environment and denying responsibility to others),defining in a positive light,and supplication.Subsequently,this study examined whether entrepreneurs'impression management strategies improve or hamper investors'evaluation of legitimacy.Using paired data from entrepreneurs and their corresponding investors,this study found that accepting responsibility strategy is positively associated with evaluative legitimacy,the strategy of denying responsibility to others is negatively associated with evaluative legitimacy,and the strategies of denying responsibility to environment,defining in a positive light,and supplication have no significant effects on evaluative legitimacy.This study has several theoretical contributions to the research of entrepreneurial failure and impression management theories.First,this study clarifies the nature of impression management strategies after entrepreneurial failure and developed a scale for the specific concept,to provide a measurement for future related research.Second,this study integrates linguistic theory and signaling theory to reveal how such strategies affect evaluative legitimacy,extending the research on the influential mechanism of impression management strategies on legitimacy.Third,this study enriches the legitimacy research of the evaluator perspective,further demonstrating the necessity and important value to focus on specific organizational audiences.By doing so,this study provides entrepreneurs with a template to cope with entrepreneurial failure.This study is an exploratory research,which has some limitations and provides a direction for future research.First,this research collects entrepreneurs'public narratives to extract the mainly used impression management strategies under specific situations(i.e.,entrepreneurial failure).Future research can integrate other methods to test the robustness of this scale.Second,this study used a snowball approach to collect paired data between entrepreneurs and investors.This method is more reliable than conducting surveys from a single respondents.Future research could attempt to integrate multiple research methods to extend this line of resesrch.Third,this study only preliminarily examined the effectiveness of a single strategy.Future research can combine configuration analysis to discuss the effectiveness of combination strategies.And also,this study only preliminarily tested the predictive effect of impression management strategies on evaluative legitimacy,but it is not yet known whether legitimacy can be translated into investors'subsequent investment behavior.Future research can further extend the remote consequences of impression management strategies.
entrepreneurial failureimpression management strategiesevaluative legitimacyscale development
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
维普
