12366: The Role of Envy in Venture Performance (session 26169)

Entrepreneurship research and practice suggest that founders benefit from interacting with peers and learning from role models. However, social comparison theory predicts that these interactions may also generate envy among founders—that is, a hostile affect arising from unfavorable, upwards social comparisons—which may be detrimental to founders’ ventures. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we argue that entrepreneurial experience and the dynamism of the environments in which the founders’ ventures operate can shape the relationship between envy and venture performance. Specifically, relying on a sample of 141 founders recruited from an acceleration program and a two-wave survey design, we can show that envy can, indeed, reduce venture performance under certain conditions, in particular in highly dynamic environments. In contrast, for founders with high entrepreneurial experience and for those operating in less dynamic environments envy can actually enhance performance. Our findings highlight the complex role of envy in the entrepreneurial process and make important contributions to the literatures on entrepreneurial affect and social environments.

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