War Stories: Failure Empathy and Recovery in a Virtual Entrepreneurial Community of Practice

• In Event: 40263 - Knowledge Markets, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Entrepreneurs exchange war stories of failure in virtual communities of practice. How does this display of empathy influence recovery from failure? We theorize that these empathetic exchanges address the puzzle of how entrepreneurs re-enter entrepreneurship despite decreased self-efficacy following failure. We argue that perceived empathy from “second stories” of similar failure experience promotes self-efficacy, thereby increasing the motivation and intention to persist. We test this empirically using data from a virtual entrepreneurial community of practice on Reddit. From discussion thread text, we measure differences in expressed self-efficacy and intention to persist for discussions exhibiting empathy or not. We find evidence that empathy indeed promotes persistence via self-efficacy. We also find that perceived general empathy may promote persistence more effectively than failure-specific empathy, but that telling a second story of failure - i.e. expressing empathy with the original narrator’s failure experience, is the strongest predictor of entrepreneurial persistence among the variables considered here. These findings have important implications for literature on the process of entrepreneurial recovery from failure, the tension between negative emotion and failure recovery, and the virtual communities of practice of entrepreneurs.

Authors

• Jessica J. Santana, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Brandon Lepine, UC Santa Barbara

• Fares Ahmad, UC Santa Barbara