title: The employability of former entrepreneurs : Pre-hire analyses of employers’ perceptions
Creators: name: Küsshauer, Alexander
Publisher: name: University of Bayreuth
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Post-Entrepreneurial Careers
subject: Employability
subject: Stereotypes
subject: Uncertainty, Entrepreneurial Failure Attributions
subject: Test-Retest Reliability
subject: 330

description: Entrepreneurship is not a final career destination. Accordingly, there is an emerging debate in the entrepreneurial careers literature about the employability of former entrepreneurs in subsequent paid employment. By investigating income distributions, current research proposes both earning premiums and wage penalties for former entrepreneurs. Despite the meaningful contributions of this research, the literature occurs predominantly on the macro-economic level with large-scale administrative data, concentrates on post-hire performance measures for such individuals with a “successful” transition into paid employment, and is far away from a consistent picture on the employability of former entrepreneurs. Research on the pre-hire employability of former entrepreneurs is scattered, and it is not intuitively clear if former entrepreneurs are preferred job candidates in the eyes of future employers. Therefore, this dissertation addresses this void by zooming into employers’ subjective perceptions of former entrepreneurs’ employability. By that, this dissertation establishes a pre-hire and cognitive-based perspective grounded in categorization and attribution theories to contribute to the employability debate about former entrepreneurs. To achieve this, Chapter 1 describes the scientific relevance, the goals, and the intended contributions of this dissertation. Chapter 2 develops and tests a novel theory about the employability of former entrepreneurs by accounting for the heterogeneity in employers’ perceptions and the underlying mechanisms in two studies. Overall, employability perceptions are mediated by the positive and negative stereotypes and the inherent uncertainty employers possess about former entrepreneurs resulting in an overall negative perception of former entrepreneurs. Moreover, there is evidence that the entrepreneurship category has “neutral” employment implications if the job opening comes with personnel responsibility, if the entrepreneur has failure in the vita, or if employers are more similar to the entrepreneur. Chapter 3 addresses the stereotypes about former entrepreneurs more directly. Results from a priming experiment indicate that six negative stereotype factors (e.g., difficulties in following instructions) explain the negative employability perceptions and four stereotype factors that compensate for the general negative effect (e.g., good people management). Chapter 4 targets employers’ perceptions of former entrepreneurs’ failure attributions. The results from a metric conjoint experiment indicate that person-centered failure attributions (e.g., lack of skill or lack of effort) outweigh the distancing attributions in the employment interview, especially when the former entrepreneur is female. Chapter 5 has a methodological focus and illustrates the concerns with the current use of test-retest reliabilities in metric conjoint experiments (a recurring issue of the previous chapters). Two simulation studies indicate that the current reliability threshold of r = 0.70 is superficial as regression outcomes are relatively stable across several test-retest reliabilities. The last chapter summarizes the previous chapters and discusses the overall scientific contributions. Overall, this dissertation helps to understand the employment implications for former entrepreneurs by zooming into employers’ subjective evaluations of former entrepreneurs’ employability.