The Impact of Failure on Re-entrepreneurial Performance:
A Mediation Model using Bootstrap
ChenFei Meng
The Department of Business Administration, Zhejiang Gongshang University School, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China
Keywords: Entrepreneurial Failure, Entrepreneurial Resilience, Re-Entrepreneurial Performance.
Abstract: Since the outbreak of the new champions league in 2019, more entrepreneurial companies impacted by the
economic crisis, the failure is more common phenomenon, and entrepreneurship failure as an important
situation, business process is unique to the entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs entrepreneurship again more has
information value, for entrepreneurs to entrepreneurship and improve performance and provide the possibility.
Therefore, this paper discusses the impact of failure scenarios on entrepreneurial resilience, and investigates
re-entrepreneurial performance as a result to illustrate the positive effect of entrepreneurial failure through
entrepreneurial resilience. A total of 252 valid questionnaires were collected, and SPSS was used for reliability
and validity test, regression analysis and Bootstrap test. The conclusions are as follows: entrepreneurial
resilience is a key potential mechanism for entrepreneurs to move from failure to success, and plays a
significant mediating role. This paper provides a new perspective for analyzing the psychological mechanism
and behavior of entrepreneurs in the context of entrepreneurial failure and puts forward future research
directions.
1 INTRODUCTION
With the rising cost of living, the increasing difficulty
of employment and work pressure, as well as the
temptation of high income from we-media, more and
more people begin to participate in the upsurge of
entrepreneurship. However, the entrepreneurial
process is full of challenges and uncertainties, and
many blind entrepreneurs, even experienced
entrepreneurs, will inevitably fail. Especially in the
context of the epidemic last year, entrepreneurs faced
various difficulties, such as lack of capital, technical
bottlenecks and brain drain, which brought great
pressure to entrepreneurs and even threatened their
survival. In this crisis, a large number of small
businesses have been hit, causing economic, social
and psychological damage to entrepreneurs, for
whom failure is not the desired outcome. At the same
time, we also see that some entrepreneurs still persist
in difficulties, learn from failure, recover quickly, and
finally turn the tide against the wind and achieve
success. In fact, although entrepreneurial failure
brings negative impact to entrepreneurs, it may also
become the key to success for entrepreneurs to start
again (Bandura 2002). Failure is the mother of
success is a well-known proverb. It can be found that
those entrepreneurs who start again after failure tend
to become more determined and adapt to risks,
overcome numerous difficulties in the following
entrepreneurial process and achieve higher
entrepreneurial performance. So you can think,
entrepreneurs in order to ensure the sustainable
development of enterprises, and maintain a good
business performance in the grim situation, need to
quickly recover from failure and coping with
adversity, and toughness is an important
psychological factor, and entrepreneurs to grow from
the failure, enter new entrepreneurial activities and
potential mechanism of success.
At present, the research level and perspective of
entrepreneurial failure have made great progress. The
academic circle began to view entrepreneurial failure
from a positive perspective and pay attention to the
positive impact of failure on future enterprises.
Scholars analyzed the relationship between
entrepreneurial failure and subsequent
entrepreneurial performance from different positive
perspectives (Duchek 2018). One is based on the
reflection effect of prospect theory, studies have
found that a failure of entrepreneurs tend to
challenging entrepreneurial activity, the failures of
the past with an unique personal experience, bring
574
Meng, C.
The Impact of Failure on Re-entrepreneurial Performance: A Mediation Model using Bootstrap.
DOI: 10.5220/0011192900003440
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Big Data Economy and Digital Management (BDEDM 2022), pages 574-581
ISBN: 978-989-758-593-7
Copyright
c
2022 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
valuable resources, promote the business fail to study,
in the next new entrepreneurial activity to improve
business performance. Secondly, from the
perspective of cognition, some scholars point out that
the cognitive ability of entrepreneurs changes after
they experience failure, which helps entrepreneurs re-
enter entrepreneurial activities and seize new
opportunities. Third, from the perspective of
resources, it is found that past failures can temper the
will of entrepreneurs, reduce the negative emotions
caused by failures, and enhance the psychological
capital such as optimism and tenacity, so as to better
try new risks. However, most of these studies focus
on the results and fail to clarify the processes
involved (Fatoki 2018). There is a kind of argument
is that business fail in addition to entrepreneurs to
bring different results, there is also a process of
rebound, namely after suffer stage there will be a
process of self recovery and adaptation, although
there are many literature has pointed out that under
the crisis business resilience building mechanism, but
the lack of the pioneering toughness how to link
failure and new venture performance research, That
is, whether entrepreneurial failure can improve new
entrepreneurial performance by shaping
entrepreneurial resilience, which is the process
mechanism of this study (Bandura 2015).
Therefore, this study introduces the positive
psychological function of entrepreneurial resilience
into the field of entrepreneurial failure, and discusses
the cost consequences of entrepreneurial failure,
whether and under what conditions these
consequences will affect subsequent entrepreneurial
resilience, and further affect the performance of re-
entrepreneurship. This not only provides a new idea
for the theoretical explanation, but also helps to
inspire the construction of psychological functions at
the individual level and help entrepreneurs cope with
the risks encountered in the process of
entrepreneurship.
This study has made the following three important
contributions. First of all, although some research
started from a positive perspective on business
failure, and focus on the positive influence for the
future development of failure for entrepreneurs, puts
forward the failure study coping mechanism, but
ignores the entrepreneurial tenacity is the importance
of this mental ability in entrepreneurial process, about
how business resilience from the failure to develop
and help entrepreneurs to cope with the crisis analysis
of the mechanism is not yet complete. Based on the
ternary interactive determinism of social cognition
theory, this study analyzes that in order to re-enter
entrepreneurial activities after failure, entrepreneurs
need to cultivate resilience to help them overcome the
crisis and achieve growth and transformation.
Specifically, entrepreneurial failure is a risk factor for
the development of resilience, while success is the
result of resilience. Through positive adaptation and
response, entrepreneurs build resilience and drive
subsequent entrepreneurial success. Secondly, based
on the theory of self-adjustment, determine the
mindfulness as a specific state of mind, it is the
manner in which individual's information processing,
provide entrepreneurs with regulate emotions after
failure and improve the ability of cognition, and
through the impact toughness and entrepreneurship
failure relationship impact on subsequent
performance, enrich the mindfulness research in the
field of entrepreneurship, It provides a unique
theoretical background for understanding the
phenomenon of success after failure. Finally, this
study also provides practical significance to help
guide entrepreneurs to quickly adjust themselves
under pressure, use failure experience and
mindfulness to build individual resilience,
successfully cope with the crisis and continuously
promote the follow-up entrepreneurial performance.
2 THEORY AND HYPOTHESIS
2.1 Entrepreneurial Failure &
Entrepreneurial Resilience
Entrepreneurial resilience refers to the ability of
entrepreneurs to recover from adversity, achieve good
adaptation, successfully cope with challenges, and
achieve positive results in adversity despite adverse
events such as difficulties, pressure, and failure. In
entrepreneurial practice, entrepreneurial resilience has
become an ability for entrepreneurs to recover quickly
in the face of difficulties and challenges, enabling
entrepreneurs to better manage potential crises,
setbacks or challenges, adapt to adversity and become
stronger. Therefore, entrepreneurial resilience plays
an important role in entrepreneurial activities,
especially in the context of failure (Adomako 2018).
In previous studies, most scholars only focused on the
impact of individual cognition and trait factors on
resilience, such as self-efficacy, optimism and
perseverance, while ignoring the particularity of
entrepreneurial background, that is, entrepreneurial
resilience can be regarded as the result of a process
derived from the experience of entrepreneurs. Later,
some scholars speculated that the experience of crisis
situations (social capital, natural disaster, economic
shock, etc.) can improve entrepreneurial resilience,
The Impact of Failure on Re-entrepreneurial Performance: A Mediation Model using Bootstrap
575
which represents the persistence of entrepreneurs in
the face of adversity after the occurrence of crisis, or
the ability to take risks again after failure. To be
specific, although entrepreneurial failure imposes
economic, social and emotional burdens on
entrepreneurs, crisis experience may further stimulate
the formation and development of entrepreneurial
resilience. Therefore, failure events as a challenge
factor may be a potential condition for the
development of entrepreneurial resilience (Boso
2019). Therefore, based on social cognition theory,
this study focuses on how entrepreneurial failure
affects the construction of entrepreneurs'
psychological rebound mechanism, proving that
entrepreneurial failure may be the antecedent of
developmental resilience, which not only opens up a
new theoretical perspective for the construction of
entrepreneurial resilience, but also endows
entrepreneurial failure with positive significance.
According to social cognition theory, personal
factors, environmental factors and behavioral factors
are mutually determining factors. From an individual
perspective, the individual experience of
entrepreneurial failure is an effective stimulus factor
to stimulate entrepreneurial resilience, which can
directly or indirectly affect individual cognitive
behavior. From the perspective of situation, the cost
of failure is a typical risk factor in failure situation,
which can stimulate entrepreneurs' resilience by
promoting the awareness and integration of
protective factors. Ultimately, the entrepreneur
achieves positive response and success by forming
resilience as a protective mechanism in difficult
situations (Cardon 2011). In other words, because the
entrepreneurial activity has great uncertainty and
high risk, the entrepreneur's personality and ability to
have higher requirements, so entrepreneurs often
have some positive qualities are different from
ordinary workers, such as high tenacity, optimistic,
self-efficacy, highly beliefs, achievement motivation,
risk perception ability and interpersonal
communication ability, etc., These qualities that
make them even after exposure to the failure of the
influence of economic cost, social cost and
psychological cost, but in personal quality factors and
entrepreneurial experience, under the interaction of
entrepreneurs still suffer stimulation may from failure
found exhibited higher cognitive level and better
entrepreneurship, failure become entrepreneurs to
strengthen its own impetus, Encourage entrepreneurs
to bounce back from failure and re-enter
entrepreneurship (Cope 2011).
It can be seen that entrepreneurial resilience, as a
dynamic ability to cope with crisis, determines that
entrepreneurs adjust and start again from failure and
make use of the positive factors in failure experience
to achieve higher performance. Integrated the above
discussion, the mechanism of action of
entrepreneurial toughness showed that ductile failure
experience may be entrepreneurs build a stimulating
factor, and this article research object for small start-
ups, small micro enterprise on a smaller scale,
investment, technology and emotional resources are
limited, therefore, a failed loss is relatively less, in
general, This paper assumes that entrepreneurs have
a chance to successfully cope with the crisis and
exhibit strong resilience.
H1: There is a positive correlation between
entrepreneurial failure cost and entrepreneurial
resilience.
2.2 Entrepreneurial Resilience &
Re-entrepreneurial Performance
Entrepreneurial resilience is an important factor for
entrepreneurs to achieve success, so this study takes
re-entrepreneurial performance as the result of
entrepreneurial resilience. Entrepreneurial resilience
has been proved to play a positive role in the success
of enterprises in multiple studies, which is usually
manifested in the process of helping individuals to
recover from adversity, cope with challenges and
actively adapt (He 2020). Studies have highlighted
the positive significance of entrepreneurial resilience
from different perspectives. From the perspective of
resources, entrepreneurial resilience is a resource that
entrepreneurs can mobilize and use in difficult
situations to help them better cope with difficulties
and take actions (Kumju 2019). By studying
entrepreneurs in Afghanistan, they found that in
hostile environments such as war, entrepreneurial
resilience can boost entrepreneurship and help
entrepreneurs overcome obstacles to progress. Based
on emotions broaden and build the Angle of view,
positive emotions broaden the scope of the attention
of the individual, to make them more open in the
perception of pressure situation, a more constructive
and creative, and tough will produce positive
emotions, such as desire, excitement and happiness,
so resilient entrepreneurs can better adjust the
emotional response of adverse circumstances,
Interpreting their startup environment as constructive
challenges they are capable of tackling increases the
chances of success. From the cognitive perspective,
entrepreneurial resilience is regarded as a necessary
cognitive ability and way of thinking for
entrepreneurial success. Entrepreneurs with
resilience are able to effectively cope with various
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576
threats and pressures in entrepreneurship, especially
to find opportunities and move forward from crises.
Duchek also noted that entrepreneurs with high levels
of entrepreneurial resilience are more likely to see
opportunities in difficult situations and effectively
overcome the stress of starting a business to succeed.
In combination with social cognition theory, this
study argues that individuals with entrepreneurial
resilience can improve the situation and enhance
subsequent enterprise performance by changing the
perception of failure (Santoro 2020). First, business
fail to entrepreneurs economic, social and emotional
aspects of negative batter and trauma, and prone to
negative cognition, entrepreneurial toughness can
change the cognitive, of the individuals in the
adversity can well adapt to continue to maintain a
positive attitude and persistent efforts, thus
improving expectations of subsequent
entrepreneurship and feasibility (Jeng 2019). Second,
have toughness of individuals through self-regulation
mechanism actively resist risk factors, take the
initiative to find a solution to the dilemma, do not
complain, do not panic, do not give up speaking out
of turn, actively try to business again, in the process
of the self transcendence, cognitive level and self-
consciousness significantly increased, for the new
entrepreneurial activities inspire confidence and
create success. In summary, this paper argues that
entrepreneurial resilience can promote re-
entrepreneurial performance.
H2: There is a positive correlation between
entrepreneurial toughness and re-entrepreneurial
performance.
2.3 The Mediating Role of
Entrepreneurial Resilience
First, the cost of failure promotes resilience. Risk
factors or setbacks are one of the conditions for the
development of resilience. Resilience mainly comes
from individuals' experiences of successfully coping
with stress and danger in adversity, especially the
severity of negative events and risk factors, which
significantly affect the formation of resilience (Liu
2019). Entrepreneurs before failure is a startup
process of the construction of the toughness, the
failure of the economic, social and psychological and
other costs increased the entrepreneurs perception of
failure loss degree, in the face of the serious damages
cases, entrepreneurs showed high risk tendency, will
actively adapt and cope with risks, rebound from
adversity, enhance their resilience (Corner 2017).
This argument is supported by the research of Duchek
et al. In his study, outstanding entrepreneurs have
carried out early entrepreneurial activities before
their current achievements, and the costs they paid in
the past have shaped their strong entrepreneurial
resilience, which further supports the construction
mechanism of resilience.
Secondly, as an important resource for
entrepreneurs in difficult situations, resilience
indicates that entrepreneurs with strong resilience can
easily cope with various pressures in entrepreneurial
activities, and are more likely to achieve success than
those without resilience (Weinberger 2018). By
studying entrepreneurs in Afghanistan,
Bullough et al.
found that entrepreneurial resilience can still promote
entrepreneurs' entrepreneurial actions and help them
overcome obstacles in the face of adverse
circumstances such as war. To support this argument,
Duchek also emphasized that entrepreneurs with high
levels of entrepreneurial resilience are more likely to
identify opportunities in difficult situations,
effectively overcome the stress of starting a business,
and succeed. It further shows that entrepreneurs with
strong entrepreneurial resilience will maintain a
positive attitude when they encounter failure,
constantly improve adversity and change the
perception of failure, so as to self-adjust and adapt,
inspire confidence in new entrepreneurial activities
and improve the performance of new enterprises. In
addition, for entrepreneurs of small and micro
enterprises, the loss is generally within a certain
range. When the failure reveals the gap between the
status quo and self-set goals, entrepreneurs are easy
to be motivated by the stimulus factors, so as to
enhance the level of cognition and resilience to make
up for potential deficiencies, and finally achieve
success.
Taking these arguments together with social
cognitive theory, this study finds that recovering from
failure and re-entering entrepreneurial activity is a
unique rebound process for entrepreneurs that builds
stronger resilience and leads to positive outcomes. It
follows that resilient entrepreneurs not only
recognize the consequences of their startup's failure,
but also know how to profit from it and develop a new
startup. According to the above inference, this study
expects that there is an intermediary relationship
between the cost of entrepreneurial failure and the
performance of re-entrepreneurship, that is,
entrepreneurial resilience is the result of
entrepreneurial failure and triggers the further
improvement of entrepreneurs' ability and the
performance level of new enterprises.
H3: Entrepreneurial resilience mediates the
relationship between entrepreneurial failure and re-
entrepreneurial performance.
The Impact of Failure on Re-entrepreneurial Performance: A Mediation Model using Bootstrap
577
3 RESEARCH DESIGN
3.1 Sample Collection & Variable
Measurement
According to the definition of entrepreneurs and
again another enterprise, the data of this study is
derived from the established time in eight years,
founder of small enterprises and their research groups
choose experienced business fail serial entrepreneur
or the core of entrepreneurial team members, directly
involved in the entrepreneurial process, and the
ability to accurately describe the past business failure.
Because more special sample groups, through
multilateral consultation found that first-tier cities
and second-tier cities entrepreneurial energy level is
relatively high, small startups are numerous, and
visited many of startup hubs for small startups,
including hangzhou, shaoxing and ningbo and other
places of startup hubs, also identified around
experienced business fail and entrepreneurial friends
or relatives again. Online with the help of the
questionnaire star platform of professional
institutions, the questionnaire content is input and the
respondents are invited to fill in the questionnaire
through the link to avoid the embarrassment of direct
contact. The questionnaire survey lasted for nearly a
month. A total of 362 questionnaires were sent out
and 278 were recovered, with a recovery rate of
75.75%. 252 valid questionnaires were obtained after
removing invalid questionnaires with too many
missing values and unsatisfactory research objects.
Entrepreneurial failure. Cost is commonly used in
existing research, a failed to measure the severity of
the business fail, in the existing research, this paper
existing maturity scale and combined with domestic
entrepreneurship, from economic, psychological and
social three aspects of a total of 10 item measured,
using Likert5 point scoring scale, from 1 to 5 degree
respectively very do not meet to meet very much.
Specific questions include "I almost went bankrupt
because of a startup failure" and "a startup failure
affected my relationships with other stakeholders."
Entrepreneurial resilience. After referring to
various studies on entrepreneurial resilience, CD-
RISC-10 was used to measure entrepreneurial
resilience. There were 10 items in total, and each item
was evaluated by likert 5-point scale. "I can stay
focused under pressure," and "I consider myself a
strong person."
Re-entrepreneurial performance. The
measurement of entrepreneurial performance refers
to the research of Biggadke and Wang Huafeng and
other scholars, and measures entrepreneurial
performance by evaluating the growth rate and
success degree of a start-up compared with its
competitors in five aspects: number of employees,
sales, innovation, market share and profit.
3.2 Scale Design and Reliability
The constructs involved in this study included the
cost of entrepreneurial failure, entrepreneurial
resilience and re-entrepreneurial performance. The
Cronbach's α coefficients of each scale were 0.826,
0.879 and 0.859, respectively, which were all higher
than the acceptable standard value of 0.7, indicating
that the scale used in this study had good internal
consistency.
This study uses factor analysis to reveal whether
the internal structure of variables conforms to the
theoretical relationship of the study. Among them,
exploratory factor analysis results showed that KMO
values were all greater than 0.7, and significance P
<0.001, meeting the requirements of factor analysis.
Confirmatory factor analysis was performed, and all
the values were in line with the standard (X2 /Df
=1.875, CFI=0.905; IFI = 0.906; RMSEA=0.059),
with good structural validity.
4 HYPOTHESIS TESTING
4.1 Correlation Test
In this paper, Pearson correlation analysis was
conducted for each variable using SPSS. The mean
value, standard deviation and correlation coefficient
of each variable are shown in Table 1. It is found that
there is a good correlation between the cost of
entrepreneurial failure and entrepreneurial resilience
and re-entrepreneurial performance, which
preliminarily verifies the hypothesis test of this paper
and lays a foundation for the subsequent regression
analysis.
Table 1: Correlation analysis.
variable Mean SD 1 2 3
Entrepreneurial
failure
3.38 0.88 1
Entrepreneurial
resilience
3.98 0.63 0.259** 1
Re-
entrepreneurial
performance
3.67 0.76 0.232** 0.285** 1
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578
4.2 The Relationship between
Entrepreneurial Failure Cost,
Entrepreneurial Resilience and
Re-Entrepreneurial Performance
First, this paper proposes a hypothesis that the cost of
entrepreneurial failure has a positive effect on
entrepreneurial resilience. The results show that
entrepreneurial failure has a positive effect on
entrepreneurial resilience (β=0.263, P <0.001), and
the R-square value increases by 0.068, and the F
value changes significantly, indicating that model 2
has a better explanation of entrepreneurial resilience
than Model 1. This indicates that the path effect of
entrepreneurial failure cost to entrepreneurial
resilience is significant, that is, the cost of
entrepreneurial failure can promote the formation of
entrepreneurial resilience, so hypothesis 1 is
supported. Secondly, the impact of entrepreneurial
resilience on re-entrepreneurial performance is
examined. As shown in Table 2, Model 3 is the
benchmark model with control variables added, and
model 4 adds variable entrepreneurial resilience on
the basis of Model 3. In Model 4, the regression
coefficient of entrepreneurial resilience to re-
entrepreneurial performance is significantly positive
(β=0.278, P <0.01), and the change of R square is
0.070, and the change of F is significant, indicating
that Model 4 has a higher degree of explanation than
Model 3. Therefore, there is a significant positive
correlation between entrepreneurial resilience and re-
entrepreneurial performance, and hypothesis 2 is
supported.
Table 2: Regression analysis results.
variable
Entrepreneurial
resilience
Re-entrepreneurial
performance
Model 1 Model 2
Model
3
Model 4
gender -0.056 -0.073 -0.097 -0.081
age -0.233 -0.206 -0.016 0.049
education 0.151 0.163 0.116 0.073
Establish
ment Yea
r
0.153 0.135 0.031 -0.011
Number
of
entreprene
urship
0.102 0.075 0.027 -0.001
Entrepren
eurial
failure
0.263***
Entrepren
eurial
resilience
0.278**
variable
Entrepreneurial
resilience
Re-entrepreneurial
performance
Model 1 Model 2
Model
3
Model 4
R-square 0.091 0.159 0.025 0.095
F 4.953
7.729***
1.272
4.301***
4.3 The Mediation Effect
The SPSS macro developed by Preacher and Hayes
was adopted to test the mediation effect using the
Bootstrap method. The sample size was selected as
5000, the confidence interval was set as 95%, the
independent variable was selected as entrepreneurial
failure, the dependent variable was selected as
entrepreneurial performance, and the intermediary
variable was entrepreneurial toughness. The
following mediation analysis results were obtained,
as shown in Table 3. The total effect of independent
variable entrepreneurial failure on dependent variable
re-entrepreneurial performance is significant
(BootLLCI=0.094, BootULCI=0.295). The
mediating test results of entrepreneurial toughness
between entrepreneurial failure and re-
entrepreneurial performance do not contain 0,
indicating that the mediating effect is significant
(BootLLCI=0.007, BootULCI=0.091), and the
mediating effect value is 0.042. In addition, the direct
effect of entrepreneurial failure on re-entrepreneurial
performance is significant (BootLLCI=0.048,
BootULCI=0.257), and the effect value is 0.152.
Therefore, entrepreneurial resilience plays a
mediating role in the relationship between
entrepreneurial failure and re-entrepreneurial
performance.
EF: Entrepreneurial failure; ER: Entrepreneurial
resilience; EP: entrepreneurial performance.
Table 3: Results of Bootstrap mediation effect.
The path Effect
BootS
E
BootLL
CI
BootUL
CI
EF→ER
→EP
0.042 0.022 0.007 0.091
EC→EP 0.152 0.054 0.048 0.257
Total
effect
0.194 0.051 0.094 0.295
4.4 Analysis of Research Results
This paper aims to explain the internal relationship
between entrepreneurial failure cost, entrepreneurial
resilience and re-entrepreneurial performance,
analyze the impact mechanism of entrepreneurial
failure cost on entrepreneurial resilience, and verify
The Impact of Failure on Re-entrepreneurial Performance: A Mediation Model using Bootstrap
579
the mediating effect of entrepreneurial resilience.
Based on theory and practice, this study proposes
hypotheses, constructs theoretical models, and
collects relevant data for empirical analysis. The data
analysis results show that all the hypotheses proposed
in this study are verified, which indicates that
entrepreneurial failure has an impact on
entrepreneurial performance and entrepreneurial
resilience plays a mediating role.
First, entrepreneurial failure has certain positive
significance for entrepreneurial resilience. Despite
the high cost of entrepreneurial failure, the unique
personal experience of entrepreneurs can effectively
stimulate the key factors of entrepreneurial resilience,
help entrepreneurs re-examine their own behavior
and attitude, improve their knowledge level, and get
out of the dilemma of failure to grow and develop. In
addition, entrepreneurial resilience is an important
factor for entrepreneurs to achieve subsequent
success. Entrepreneurs with resilience will re-
examine their own behaviors and attitudes and make
greater efforts in subsequent entrepreneurial
behaviors, thus improving their subsequent
entrepreneurial performance.
Second, entrepreneurial resilience mediates the
relationship between entrepreneurial failure cost and
re-entrepreneurial performance. Based on the three
dimensional interactive determinism of social
cognition theory, this paper argues that
entrepreneurial resilience mainly comes from
individuals' experience of coping successfully with
pressure and danger in adversity, and entrepreneurial
failure provides the conditions for the development of
resilience. After failure, entrepreneurs actively resist
the crisis through self-regulation mechanism, recover
from adversity and transcend themselves, shaping
strong entrepreneurial resilience and promoting the
successful development of subsequent enterprises.
5 CONCLUSIONS
5.1 Theoretical Significance
First of all, this study investigates the behavior of
entrepreneurs after failure, explaining how the past
failure experience affects them, and how they re-enter
the entrepreneurial activities and achieve good
performance after experiencing losses. Secondly,
based on theoretical methods, this study provides an
intermediary mechanism for how entrepreneurs who
fail to make use of the dynamic ability of
entrepreneurial resilience to improve their subsequent
entrepreneurial performance. Not only clarify the
toughness of the dynamic structure and forming
process and failure cost for the impact of
entrepreneurial tenacity, also analyzed the ins and
outs of the entrepreneurs entrepreneurship toughness
change after the failure, to see how the toughness
construct and the function mechanism of path
analysis, to explore the risk situation of entrepreneur
provides guidance cognitive and behavioral changes.
The results of this study suggest that entrepreneurs
who have experienced failure but re-engage in
entrepreneurship can develop stronger
entrepreneurial resilience and use this ability to
benefit from past experience, gain entrepreneurial
experience and resources, change cognitive patterns,
and improve subsequent performance.
Based on the ternary interactive determinism of
social cognition theory, this study analyzes that in
order to re-enter entrepreneurial activities after
failure, entrepreneurs need to cultivate resilience to
help them overcome the crisis and achieve growth
and transformation. Specifically, entrepreneurial
failure is a risk factor for the development of
resilience, while success is the result of resilience.
Through positive adaptation and response,
entrepreneurs build resilience and drive subsequent
entrepreneurial success.
5.2 Practical Significance
First, the results show that, in addition to the losses
associated with failure, entrepreneurial failure
enables entrepreneurs to build resilience in crisis
situations, which subsequently drives the
performance of new ventures. In other words, failure
should not be seen as the end of the entrepreneurial
journey, but rather as an opportunity to make a better
entrepreneurial move. This helps entrepreneurs face
up to the failure of entrepreneurship, understand that
failure will bring many opportunities as well as
negative effects. Entrepreneurs should view failure
positively and objectively, and take reasonable
measures to convert the stimulation of failure into
motivation and goals, so as to improve their
entrepreneurial ability. Secondly, it provides
guidance for entrepreneurs' stress response and
handling in stressful situations, so as to help
entrepreneurs quickly adjust themselves and walk out
of the shadow of past failures. Inspiration
entrepreneurs need to fully carry out resilience
construction, and use resilience as an important
psychological element to improve their
entrepreneurial ability in adversity, and continuously
promote the performance of new entrepreneurial
activities.
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5.3 Research Prospects and
Deficiencies
Although the empirical analysis results are basically
in line with the theoretical expectations, there are still
some deficiencies in this study that need to be
improved. First, although the study with the
background of uniqueness, methods using large
sample data, but the questionnaire is not controllable,
and the object of the research are mainly concentrated
in the small micro enterprise or small entrepreneurial
teams had failure experience, and again into the
venture entrepreneurs, therefore, the application
range of the conclusions have certain limitations.
Secondly, this study did not test the threshold effect
of failure loss on re-entrepreneurial performance and
entrepreneurial resilience. Since the research group is
small and micro business owners and members of
small entrepreneurial team, the loss degree is smaller
than that of entrepreneurial veterans or mature
medium and large entrepreneurial enterprises, it can
be considered that entrepreneurs with higher loss
degree may produce threshold effect. To this end, an
important approach for future research is to study the
extent to which the severity of loss explains the
impact on entrepreneurial resilience and re-
entrepreneurial performance. Finally, this paper only
discusses the possible positive effects of
entrepreneurial failure cost on entrepreneurial
resilience, which is a complex concept and requires
comprehensive consideration of the interaction
mechanism between situational factors and individual
factors. Is resilience a relatively stable trait or a
situational psychological state? Whether resilience
varies from event to event and from person to person,
and the understanding and recognition of failure by
entrepreneurs with different resilience is also worth
further research and discussion.
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