Entrepreneurs’ Cognitive Biases and Heuristics in Entrepreneurial Team Recruitment.

2014

Jonathan pinto

Scholarly work on entrepreneurial cognitions has focused largely on opportunity recognition. However, the formation of the entrepreneurial team is an important step towards making the enterprise a reality and the selection of team members is a complex decision-making task which could be affected by cognitive biases and heuristics. This topic been relatively neglected thus far and I address it by developing a cognitive model of entrepreneurial team recruitment which serves as an integrative framework to articulate the potential role of several cognitive biases and heuristics in black boxes at two stages – (1) identification of a consideration set of criteria and candidates; and (2) evaluation and choice of team members. I also separately apply this model to experienced (i.e., habitual or repeat) entrepreneurs. I discuss the research implications of this work with particular focus on three entrepreneur individual difference topics – entrepreneur’s motivations (i.e., necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs), gender, and cognitive style. Finally, I provide entrepreneurs with a set of debiasing tactics and strategies.

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