Antecedents and Outcomes of Mentor-Entrepreneur Relationships

Positive Emotional Traits, Entrepreneurial Identity and Help-Seeking Behavior

Entrepreneurs often find themselves in conditions of uncertainty and information asymmetry, which influence their motivation to entrepreneurial proactivity (i.e. help-seeking behavior) and their mental well-being (e.g. stress level). Not only when growing a successful firm, but also when facing failures and company crises, entrepreneurs need psychosocial assistance and information from others (outside of their own firms) which can help them to solve and overcome such complicated problems and difficult situations. In this paper, I demonstrate that ongoing trust-based entrepreneur-mentor intimacy significantly influences an entrepreneur’s motivation to seek information and psychosocial assistance which may lead to improved performance recursively. My research makes the following contributions: (1) theoretically, this study contributes to mentoring literature, focusing on the antecedents and outcomes of informal mentoring relationship in the entrepreneurial context; (2) researchers of pro-social organizational behavior recognize that the mentor-entrepreneur relationship is an antecedent of a help-seeking behavior which is a form of pro-social organizational behavior; (3) this research contributes to motivation literature, showing that as motivation resources, emotional traits and entrepreneurial identity play important roles in the initiation and maintenance of an entrepreneur’s trust-based, long-term interpersonal relationships when running a business.