The role of Personal Values in the Entrepreneurship Research. An analysis of new trends, decision making and success of entrepreneurs

Abstract

Nowadays entrepreneurs deal with new technological, social and environmental challenges. Faced with this unpredictable environment, personal values can help to understand the decisions that have to be made. Personal values have been conceptualized as beliefs that serve as guiding principles in life and their relationship with behavior has been a key issue for a long time. In fact, personal values have been employed in a wide range of fields interested in understand their influence on behavior, since they seem to bring good prediction of career selection and fit, inasmuch as individuals appear to seek jobs/careers, take business decisions and even buy products that are congruent with their values . Despite the huge interest in the entrepreneurship literature for understanding entrepreneur’s behavior and decision making process, there is a lack of studies that analyses the role played by entrepreneur’s personal values. Even when the characteristic of entrepreneurship activity, under uncertainty conditions, predicts that values should have some kind of influence. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to this research gab by developing a better and more up-to-date understanding of the values associated to the entrepreneurial career and profile and their linkages with the different levels of the entrepreneurial process, and learn how entrepreneurs’ values influence or affect their decisions within their companies and, therefore, their business results. In pursuit of the objective, it is proposed a compendium of three articles corresponding to the central chapters of this thesis. The first article (Chapter 2) is a bibliometric analysis of the most productive and influential journals, scholars and papers that have studied the concept of personal values, and how they have been explored within the entrepreneurship research. In essence, this second chapter quantitatively confirmed the relevance of the study of personal values in entrepreneurship research, leading to the next article of this thesis. The second article (Chapter 3) proposes a novel understanding of the personal values of entrepreneurs and their decision to start a business. More importantly this article shows that the influence of personal values extends beyond the way in which entrepreneurs behave and act once their company starts trading. As result, this second article proposes a research roadmap which includes those lines that should be explored in the future. The third article of this thesis (Chapter 4) is dedicated to the exploration of one of the suggested opportunities detected in the second article. Overall, this paper tests the theory behind the relationship between entrepreneurs’ values and the strategic decisions they make within their businesses, and their influence on business success. Finally, the conclusions section (Chapter 5) reflects on the results obtained. All in all, our findings suggest that future research should include value orientation as a critical variable in the study of entrepreneurship. In many countries economic incentives are offered to promote entrepreneurship. Unfortunately much of this support only reaches certain segments of the population of entrepreneurs whose values match those identified in the traditional image. The study of entrepreneurs’ values could produce very rich information not only for the institutions that promote entrepreneurial activities, but also for business organizational scholars who need to understand the underlying factors behind employee commitment and job satisfaction. Implications are discussed around the design of policies aimed at promoting and prevailing entrepreneurship. In developing countries, where the creation and survival of business entities play a relevant role in the recovery of employment and economy, the results of this thesis are relevant for developing stronger and more resilient organizations.