The impact of time perspective on entrepreneurs’ alertness to new opportunities

Abstract

While the general concepts of time and temporal perspectives have received growing attention in recent literature (e.g., Aeon & Aguinis, 2017; Kunisch, Bartunek, Mueller, & Huy, 2017; Reinecke & Ansari, 2015), their potential role and influence in how entrepreneurs do think and act has for the most part not. For example, entrepreneurship scholars have investigated some dimensions of objective (measurable) time (e.g., Bluedorn & Martin, 2008) such as deadlines, schedules, and work pace. However, they have somewhat neglected subjective (psychological) time (for exceptions, see Bird & West, 1997; Lévesque & Stephan, 2020) and one of its key aspects: TP (i.e., the sum of the individual’s viewpoints of his psychological past and future existing at a given time; see Lewin, 1997: 222). In particular, entrepreneurship scholars have not shed much light on how the valence (the positive value of a past-positive, present-hedonistic, and future TP; the negative value of a past-negative and present-fatalistic TP) of temporal experiences (past, present, and future) (i.e., the TP) impacts how entrepreneurs think and act