Preparing Nascent And Early Stage Entrepreneurs For Their Entrepreneurial Journey: What Psychological Resources Do They Need And How Can They Be Acquired?

Introduction - Based on the growing focus on how best to train, educate and prepare all types of entrepreneurs (Fayolle, 2013, Nabi et al., 2016, Thrane et al., 2016) this development paper seeks to extend the psychological dimensions of entrepreneurship through the development of a model of entrepreneurial psychological capital (EPC). EPC attempts to identify those psychological resources which are open to development, and which help potential, nascent and early stage entrepreneurs achieve positive outcomes. Limited attempts have been made to apply the organisation-employee model of psychological capital to entrepreneurship (Hmieleski and Carr, 2008b, Baron et al., 2013) but to date no one has developed a model of entrepreneurial psychological capital built up from the entrepreneurship psychology literature. Entrepreneurship Psychology Models: Source of Construct The entrepreneurship psychology literature is reviewed using the framework developed by Acs and Audretsch (2006) and updated by Omorede et al. (2015) which divides the literature into the subareas of personality, cognition, emotion, attitude and self. Each section is analysed through the lens of the search for potential psychological resource constructs, which could be open to development, and could therefore be included in our model. Entrepreneurial Psychological Capital: What is it? Our working definition of entrepreneurial psychological capital is, “the psychological resources which entrepreneurs need to pursue and sustain their entrepreneurial ambition”. The organisation-employee model of psychological capital (Luthans et al., 2007) is explained and the existing studies which have applied this model to entrepreneurship are reviewed. Research Approach and Methodology - The constructs to be included in this initial and ongoing study are discussed and the proposed methodology for developing and validating a tool to define and measure entrepreneurial psychological capital is set out. Initial results of the iterative and ongoing and face and content validity results are discussed. Contribution - This study will make two contributions: firstly, the theoretical development of entrepreneurial psychological capital from the entrepreneurship literature, which will provide a resource based perspective for entrepreneurship psychology, and secondly the development of a tool which can be used to validate and operationalise the construct.