Hope this E-Mail finds you well – An empirical investigation on the ambiguous influence of empathy on entrepreneurial success

CDM Seminar:
"Hope this E-Mail finds you well – An empirical investigation on the ambiguous influence of empathy on entrepreneurial success"
Speaker: Carolin Bock, TU Darmstadt

Host: Marc Gruber

Abstract:
Is entrepreneurial empathy a merely good thing? In contrast to the hitherto predominantly positive view on entrepreneurial empathy, psychology and management scholars have recently adopted a more critical perspective. Transferring their findings, we provide a novel “too-much-of-a-good-thing” perspective
on entrepreneurial empathy. We test our model against a dataset of 4,725 real entrepreneurs and demonstrate that empathy influences opportunity recognition, evaluation, and exploitation in an inverted U-shaped pattern. We also show that these exploited opportunities then lead to higher amounts of financial resources achieved. These findings provide strong evidence for considering entrepreneurial empathy as an important but highly ambiguous success
factor.
 
Biographical information

Since 2015, Carolin Bock is Professor of Entrepreneurship at Technische Universität Darmstadt. Before, she was Post-Doc at the Center of Entrepreneurial and Financial Studies at Technische Universität Mu¨nchen. Her main research interests are in the field of entrepreneurial finance, particularly on decision-making and value adding capabilities of different investor types. Further, she conducts research on academic entrepreneurship, technology transfer processes and entrepreneurship in crises.