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Entrepreneurial alertness in eustress complex environments: An experimental approach of the exploitation/exploration dilemma
Author(s) -
Aimar Thierry,
Bouhdaoui Yassine,
Mateu Guillermo,
Sutan Angela
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
strategic change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.527
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1099-1697
pISSN - 1086-1718
DOI - 10.1002/jsc.2329
Subject(s) - alertness , dilemma , psychology , cognitive psychology , computer science , social psychology , mathematics , psychiatry , geometry
Technological and organizational constraints hinder entrepreneurial ability in alertly selecting/exploiting new opportunities. This article aims at showing that the complexity of the environment shapes entrepreneurial alertness. We build an experiment to mimic the choice alertness process (a case of eustress) and measure alertness and its relations with opportunity appearances, entrepreneurial effort, and complexity of the production structure. We show that alertness increases with the selection of more opportunities, but not with the complexity of the environment itself. At the same time, the entrepreneurial effort rate reduces alertness significantly more when participants are in a complex environment.