Unpacking entrepreneurial alertness: How character matters for entrepreneurial thinking

ABSTRACT

Over centuries and across cultures, scholars have consistently highlighted the role of character for achieving personal and societal good. Yet we know little about how character matters for entrepreneurship. This study builds upon the theory of character strengths to extend our knowledge about personal antecedents of entrepreneurial thinking. Specifically, we examine how character strengths of valor, industriousness, and critical thinking can affect different dimensions of entrepreneurial alertness: scanning and search, association and connection, and evaluation and judgment. We use two samples of 412 students and 145 entrepreneurs to test the study’s hypotheses. The results shed light on how strengths of character may have varying relationships with different dimensions of entrepreneurial alertness. We discuss our contributions to the entrepreneurship literature and suggest future research directions.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurial alertness
• character strength
• valor
• industriousness
• critical thinking
• positive psychology

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the special issue’s editorial team and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive suggestions throughout the review process.

Notes

¹ For example, Peterson and Seligman (2004) developed a list of 24 character strengths that represent six universal virtues. These include: (a) wisdom and knowledge: creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, love of learning, perspective; (b) courage: valor, industriousness, integrity, zest; (c) humanity: kindness, love, social intelligence; (d) justice: fairness, leadership, teamwork; (e) temperance: forgiveness, modesty, prudence, self-regulation; and (f) transcendence: appreciation of beauty, gratitude, hope, humor, religiousness.

² We chose not to focus on the master character strength of self-regulation because it represents the virtue of temperance, and also its effects on EA dimensions have already been investigated (please see Amato et al., 2017). Likewise, we chose not to include the master character strength of integrity in our analysis because we believe it is more relevant to individuals’ adherence to moral standards in their actions, rather than influential in their cognition, and consequently EA (Palanski & Yammarino, 2007; Peterson & Seligman, 2004).

³ The students were enrolled in different majors across the university, including mechanical engineering (11.1%), electrical engineering (9.3%), chemical engineering (14.4%), aerospace engineering (5.8%), mathematics (5.8%), computer engineering (12.1%), material engineering (7.8%), petroleum engineering (1.3%), civil engineering (5.3%), marine engineering (2.5%), industrial engineering (6.3%), economics (0.5%), physics (5.8%), computer science (1.3%), chemistry (5.3%), and management (0.5%).