Entrepreneurial Hustle: Navigating Uncertainty and Enrolling Venture Stakeholders through Urgent and Unorthodox Action

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/joms.12584
• Date: 01 July 2020
• Author: Devin Burnell,Regan Stevenson,Emily Neubert,Greg Fisher,Donald F. Kuratko
• Published date: 01 July 2020

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Entrepreneurial Hustle: Navigating Uncertainty and

Enrolling Venture Stakeholders through Urgent and

Unorthodox Action

Greg Fisher, Regan Stevenson, Emily Neubert,

Devin Burnell and Donald F. Kuratko

Indiana University

ABSTRACT Entrepreneurs need to act under conditions of uncertainty and resource con-

straints to bring new, often-unrecognizable products to market and convince an unknown set

of stakeholders to support their endeavours. The type of action entrepreneurs take to navigate

uncertain entrepreneurial contexts is underspecified. We analysed 48 interviews with entrepre-

neurs to inductively identify an action-oriented construct we labelled as entrepreneurial hustle – an

entrepreneur’s urgent, unorthodox actions that are intended to be useful in addressing immedi-

ate challenges and opportunities under conditions of uncertainty. In a follow-up study, we use

an experimental vignette approach to assess the impact of an entrepreneur’s hustle on venture

stakeholders. Findings suggest that entrepreneurial hustle positively influences stakeholder per-

ceptions of the entrepreneur’s leadership effectiveness and a venture’s legitimacy, mediated by

perceptions of the entrepreneur’s ability-based trustworthiness. We conclude that entrepreneur-

ial hustle is a fundamental behaviour that enables entrepreneurs to enrol new venture stakehold-

ers and lead their entrepreneurial efforts.

Keywords: entrepreneurial action, entrepreneurial behaviour, entrepreneurial leadership,

entrepreneurship, enrolling stakeholders, hustle, legitimacy

INTRODUCTION

‘Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle’

– Abraham Lincoln

Journal of Man agement Studi es 57:5 July 2020

doi:10. 1111/j om s.1 25 84

Address for reprints: Greg Fisher, Larry and Barbara Sharpf Professor, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship,

Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, 1309 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405-1701 (fisherg@

indiana.edu).

Entrepreneurial Hustle 1003

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Uncertainty is inherent in the creation and implementation of new products and

services that define entrepreneurship (Alvarez and Barney, 2007; Sarasvathy, 2001;

Townsend et al., 2018). Under conditions of uncertainty – where the probabilities of al-

ternative outcomes are impossible to quantify (Alvarez and Barney, 2005; Knight, 1921)

and the future is unknowable (Shackle, 1972, 1979)[1] – taking action may be one of

the only means for an entrepreneur to move forward (McMullen and Shepherd, 2006;

Sarasvathy and Venkataraman, 2011). By taking action, entrepreneurs can learn how

their ideas relate to the environment and assess whether stakeholders perceive their ef-

forts as legitimate, attractive, and worthy of support (Burns et al., 2016; Fisher et al.,

2017). Doing so shifts the entrepreneurial context from one defined by uncertainty to

one defined by risk, where the probabilities associated with alternative futures can be

estimated (Alvarez, 2007; Alvarez and Barney, 2005; Knight, 1921). Hence, to be an

entrepreneur ‘is to act on the possibility that one has identified an opportunity worth

pursuing’ (McMullen and Shepherd, 2006, p. 132).

But what actions enable entrepreneurs to navigate uncertainty and enrol stakeholders

when leading a new venture? Although scholars have suggested that examining action is

central to understanding entrepreneurship (Bird and Schjoedt, 2009), the type of action

entrepreneurs take to navigate uncertain entrepreneurial contexts is underspecified and

generally not well understood (Sarasvathy and Venkataraman, 2011). Although many

theories account for the antecedents to entrepreneurial action (McMullen and Shepherd,

2006; Wood et al., 2019a), few provide constructs or conceptualizations of what that

entrepreneurial action looks like when it is initiated. Here we propose that entrepreneurial

hustle – an entrepreneur’s urgent, unorthodox actions that are intended to be useful in

addressing immediate challenges and opportunities under conditions of uncertainty –

allows entrepreneurs to navigate uncertainty and enrol stakeholders when leading a new

venture. Understanding action under uncertainty is important because ‘entrepreneurship

theorists have embraced the position that uncertainty is detrimental to entrepreneurial

action’ (McMullen and Shepherd, 2006, p. 135). Furthermore, researchers have found

that an individual’s willingness to engage in entrepreneurial action decreases as uncer-

tainty increases (McKelvie et al., 2011). Yet clearly some entrepreneurs are able to act

under conditions of uncertainty, otherwise there would be no entrepreneurship. Thus,

examining the type of action that allows entrepreneurs to operate under conditions of

uncertainty and enrol stakeholders under such conditions is critical to advancing entre-

preneurial action theory (Alvarez and Barney, 2007; Baker and Nelson, 2005; McMullen

and Shepherd, 2006) and entrepreneurial leadership (Reid et al., 2018; Renko et al.,

2015).

To understand the actions of entrepreneurs as they navigate uncertainty, we con-

ducted two interrelated studies. First, we analysed the actions described in 48 interviews

with high-impact entrepreneurs. In each interview, entrepreneurs reflected on the types

of actions they took to overcome challenges and address opportunities. From these inter-

views, we inductively developed and defined the action-oriented behavioural construct

entrepreneurial hustle. From this analysis, we theorized that such actions were central to nav-

igating uncertainty and other important entrepreneurial activities including creating op-

portunities, resourcing, learning, establishing legitimacy, and making connections. As a

follow-up, we conducted an experimental study to assess whether entrepreneurial hustle

1004 G. Fisher et al.

© 2020 Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

has an impact on perceptions of leadership effectiveness and venture legitimacy, which

are key aspects of entrepreneurial leadership that drive stakeholder enrolment (Burns

et al., 2016; Gupta et al., 2004).

We contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by developing the construct of entre-

preneurial hustle, a fundamental, comprehensive, and integrative behavioural construct

that describes what entrepreneurs actually do in the uncertain contexts they confront.

Alvarez and Barney (2005, p. 788) argue that the primary purpose of an entrepreneurial

firm is to navigate uncertainty and attempt to ‘solve transaction difficulties associated

with the inability to know the value of an exchange at the time that exchange is com-

menced’. Moreover, much of the research on entrepreneurial action takes a static binary

approach to action – either entrepreneurs act or do not act. A more nuanced understand-

ing of entrepreneurial action would allow entrepreneurial action researchers to ask novel

and more refined questions about what entrepreneurs actually do (Bird and Schjoedt,

2009). Yet, we do not currently have a scholarly construct or perspective that delineates

the micro-actions that entrepreneurs take to overcome this uncertainty challenge. In this

research, we introduce and unpack the entrepreneurial hustle construct by identifying

the micro-behaviours that entrepreneurs use to act under uncertainty through an abduc-

tive, mixed-methods approach. This allows us to extend prior theoretical models of the

micro dynamics of entrepreneurial behaviour under uncertainty (e.g., Baker and Nelson,

2005; Fisher, 2012) and contribute to an emerging body of research that emphasizes the

re-emergence of Knightian uncertainty (Knight, 1921) as a central catalyst for novel the-

orizing (see Alvarez et al., 2018; Townsend et al., 2018). In this research, we argue that

entrepreneurial hustle serves as a necessary, but overlooked, ingredient for navigating

such extreme uncertainty and we lay out meaningful theoretical implications associated

with the concept of entrepreneurial hustle and identify research opportunities that can

build on and extend this foundational work.

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL CONTEXT AND ENTREPRENEURIAL

LEADERSHIP

Uncertainty in the Entrepreneurial Context

The entrepreneurial context is readily recognized to be different from other business and

leadership contexts (Alvarez and Barney, 2005; Fisher, 2012; McMullen and Shepherd,

2006). At the centre of this difference is the concept of uncertainty. Many entrepreneurial

contexts are riddled with uncertainty where the probabilities of alternative outcomes

are impossible to quantify (Alvarez and Barney, 2005; Knight, 1921) and the future is

unknowable (Shackle, 1972, 1979). Established business and leadership contexts are de-

fined by risk, where the probabilities associated with alternative futures can be estimated

(Alvarez, 2007; Alvarez and Barney, 2005; Knight, 1921). Acting under conditions of

uncertainty is difficult (McKelvie et al., 2011), yet action may be the only reasonable

response to move forward (Alvarez and Barney, 2007). The challenges associated with

the uncertainty inherent in the entrepreneurial context are further exacerbated by the

resource constraints (Baker and Nelson, 2005), liabilities of newness (Aldrich and Fiol,