Impression Management and Entrepreneurial Experience

Individuals’ social behavior is of crucial importance to organizational outcomes. We study social behavior patterns by investigating how individuals’ impression management tactics link to entrepreneurial experience as operationalized through the number of times an individual ventures into entrepreneurship. Analyzing individual-level data collected through online survey, field studies and experiments in hacker-and makerspaces, we find that impression management behavior that focuses others, i.e. accommodative impression management is positively associated with entrepreneurial experience while self-focused, i.e. assimilative impression management is negatively associated. Furthermore, our supplementary analyses highlight how high levels of identification with group norms may constrain the extent of entrepreneurial experience. The contributions of the study’s findings are discussed with reference to the literature on organizational behavior and change as well as entrepreneurship. We also discuss implications of the study’s new methodological approach for measuring social behavior: the application of computational linguistics to identify patterns in the use of pronouns in 454 haiku poems.