17863: Built to Last: Entrepreneurs Illuminate Agentic and Communal Legacy Motives (session 25842)

In this paper, we explore the relationship between legacy motives and entrepreneurship. We posit that entrepreneurship enables people to fulfill agentic and communal generative needs. Through entrepreneurship, people can create something that will outlive themselves – thus responding to one of the most basic human drives to strive for immortality. Across four studies, we demonstrate that legacy motivation predicts both the desire to begin an entrepreneurial venture, the real behavioral action of founding a new firm, and the choices entrepreneurs make as they run their firms. We introduce an effective legacy motive activation intervention that can promote entrepreneurial efficacy and desirability. Finally, we identify behavioral outcomes that differentially emerge from a focus on agentic versus communal legacies. Specifically, we show that while a focus on leaving an agentic legacy predicts higher patenting activity, a focus on leaving a communal legacy predicts reduced firm ownership. This research is among the first to consider a key motivational predictor of entrepreneurial intention and behavior and broadens our understanding of types of legacies and how they shape choices.

view paper (if available)