The role of affect in international opportunity recognition and the formation of international opportunity beliefs

Abstract

Despite the significance of individual factors in how entrepreneurs recognize international opportunities either by active search or passive discovery, prior research has typically focused on cognitive aspects overlooking affect as a critical driver of this process. Drawing upon broaden-and-build and affect-as-information theories, we explore how courage, hope, fear of failure, and anticipated regret, as stable affective dispositions, can influence entrepreneurs’ active and passive international opportunity recognition (IOR). Also, based on the mental model theory, we examine whether both processes can lead entrepreneurs to differently form opportunity desirability and feasibility beliefs to judge the opportunities recognized in the foreign market. Based on data from a sample of 172 international entrepreneurs, we find that hope and anticipated regret are positively related to active IOR. Hope and courage are positively related to passive IOR, and fear of failure and anticipated regret are negatively related to passive IOR. Moreover, active IOR better informs opportunity desirability and feasibility beliefs than passive IOR, which indeed only predicts feasibility. These findings are original and novel and thus add value to the flourishing literature on the individual-level factors that influence IOR processes and the emerging literature on how international opportunity desirability and feasibility beliefs are formed to evaluate IOs.