Who stays proactive after entrepreneurship training? Need for cognition, personal initiative maintenance, and well‐being

• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Author: Michael Frese,Mona Mensmann
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2333
• Date: 01 January 2019

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Who stays proactive after entrepreneurship training? Need for

cognition, personal initiative maintenance, and well‐being

Mona Mensmann

1

|Michael Frese

2,3

1

Warwick Business School, University of

Warwick, Coventry, UK

2

Department of Management and

Organisation, National University of

Singapore, NUS Business School, Singapore

3

Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Lüneburg,

Germany

Correspondence

Mona Mensmann, Warwick Business School,

University of Warwick, Coventry CV4

7AL, UK.

Email: mona.mensmann@wbs.ac.uk

Funding information

World Bank

Summary

Personal initiative training is a promising way to increase entrepreneurial personal ini-

tiative, which is a key behavior for successful entrepreneurship. Although personal ini-

tiative training has been shown to promote personal initiative, little is known about

how this proactive behavior can be maintained over time and what the consequences

are. The training transfer literature suggests that training effects usually decline with

time. It is not clear, however, which factors contribute to personal initiative mainte-

nance and which benefits go along with it. In a randomized controlled field

experiment with 912 microentrepreneurs in Lomé, Togo, we investigate the influence

of need for cognition—a cognitive factor driving proactive behavior—on personal

initiative maintenance after training. In addition, we examine the effect of need for

cognition on the well‐being consequences of personal initiative maintenance. We

show that people high in need for cognition tend to maintain posttraining personal

initiative longer than those low in need for cognition. However, contrary to our

predictions, need for cognition has no effect on the level of well‐being that results

from personal initiative maintenance. Our findings contribute to a better understand-

ing of personal initiative and its maintenance and could be used to increase training

effectiveness.

KEYWORDS

entrepreneurship, maintenance,need for cognition, personal initiative, proactive behavior, training,

well‐being

1|INTRODUCTION

Entrepreneurship is important for economic development (Acs, Desai,

& Hessels, 2008; Baumol, 2002; Hafer, 2013), especially in developing

countries (Bruton, Ketchen, & Ireland, 2013; Goedhuys & Sleuwaegen,

2010). To combat poverty in developing countries, business training

programs for entrepreneurs have been developed. However, the

long‐term impact of business trainings seems to be limited (McKenzie

& Woodruff, 2014). This is also suggested by the training transfer lit-

erature: Training effects usually decrease over time (Arthur, Bennett,

Stanush, & McNelly, 1998; Baldwin & Ford, 1988; Blume, Ford,

Baldwin, & Huang, 2010). Such a decline is particularly problematic

for entrepreneurs, because entrepreneurial success is not the result

of single entrepreneurial actions but requires a more constant search

for business opportunities (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). Thus, train-

ings that only result in short‐term changes in entrepreneurial behavior

do not lead to long‐term entrepreneurial success. This leads to the

conclusion that a critical factor of training is maintenance; mainte-

nance describes to which degree intended training effects are retained

over time (Blume et al., 2010).

Our study focuses on personal initiative maintenance, its anteced-

ents, and its consequences subsequent to personal initiative training

for microentrepreneurs. Personal initiative is proactive behavior that

is self‐starting, future‐oriented, and persistent (Fay & Frese, 2001;

Frese & Fay, 2001; Parker, Bindl, & Strauss, 2010). Individuals high

in personal initiative show self‐initiated behavior that is meant to

change their environment and goes beyond following an obvious idea

that is “up in the air”(self‐starting behavior), consider future

Received: 5 December 2016 Revised: 12 August 2018 Accepted: 5 October 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2333

20 © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2019;40:20–37.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

opportunities and threats and prepare for their occurrence (future‐ori-

ented behavior), and strive to achieve their goals despite internal and

external obstacles (persistent behavior). Personal initiative constitutes

an important behavior for entrepreneurs (Frese, 2009). It might impact

entrepreneurs in at least two ways. First, personal initiative contrib-

utes to business success, as this behavior implies a drive for differen-

tiation from competitors (Frese & Gielnik, 2014; Lieberman &

Montgomery, 1988), and a readiness to deal with the changing and

uncertain business environment (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006). Show-

ing personal initiative should help entrepreneurs to consider future

threats and opportunities (Parker & Bindl, 2017), to experiment (Frese

& Gielnik, 2014), and to persist when facing barriers (Frese & Fay,

2001). Recent research has provided evidence for the positive impact

of personal initiative on business success (Campos et al., 2017; Glaub,

Frese, Fischer, & Hoppe, 2014). Second, personal initiative might be

related to entrepreneurs' well‐being. However, the direction of this

relationship remains unclear to date. There are two predictions

(Cangiano & Parker, 2016): On the one hand, proactive behavior can

positively affect well‐being via a motivational pathway: Entrepreneurs

might increase their well‐being due to more success resulting from

showing personal initiative. On the other hand, there might also be a

negative effect via a resource‐depletion pathway: Personal initiative

might be associated with a high degree of effort and stress, eventually

leading to strain and reduced well‐being. Both the positive and nega-

tive pathways should be stronger for microentrepreneurs than for

employees. Microentrepreneurs set themselves their own goals, which

should lead to particularly high satisfaction in case of progress toward

the goal and eventually cause strong well‐being (Sheldon & Elliot,

1999). On the negative side, microentrepreneurs are usually responsi-

ble for their businesses (Frese, 2009) which might make showing per-

sonal initiative more effortful and consequential.

At this point, little is known about personal initiative maintenance

after training. The training transfer literature (Baldwin & Ford, 1988;

Blume et al., 2010; Grossman & Salas, 2011) suggests training effects

decrease over time. In the case of personal initiative, this decrease

may be particularly strong because proactive behavior is highly

context‐specific (Grant & Ashford, 2008) and effortful (Bolino, Valcea,

& Harvey, 2010). In the following, we will concentrate on personal ini-

tiative maintenance; we are not concerned about the impact of per-

sonal initiative training on personal initiative per se, as the effects

have been shown in previous studies (Campos et al., 2017; Glaub

et al., 2014). Instead, we want to investigate the impact of personal

initiative training on personal initiative maintenance. Similarly, we are

not interested in the relationship between personal initiative and

well‐being per se. Both the positive and negative relationship between

personal initiative and well‐being (Fay & Hüttges, 2017; Wang & Li,

2015) as well as the effects of well‐being on personal initiative (Hahn,

Frese, Binnewies, & Schmitt, 2012) have been shown. Instead, we

want to investigate the relationship between personal initiative main-

tenance and well‐being.

One way to enhance the effect of trainings on maintenance is to

consider trainee characteristics. So the question is which characteris-

tics should be studied in the context of personal initiative training.

Personal initiative takes effort because it implies that entrepreneurs

should show a high degree of independent goal setting, planning,

and feedback processing; similarly, maintenance also takes effort—

the most important being that people tend to go back to old

established routines when they reduce effortful processing. Thus,

the common denominator of both personal initiative and the mainte-

nance of it is that the effort lies primarily in the area of cognition. This

suggests to examine cognitive trainee characteristics that may be

important for dealing with old routines and to enhance the use of

newly developed cognitive skills (Burke & Hutchins, 2007; Grossman

& Salas, 2011). Need for cognition is such a cognitive trainee charac-

teristic as it is the relatively stable tendency to engage in and enjoy

cognitive activities (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982; Cacioppo, Petty,

Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996). Based on the model of proactive motivation

(Parker et al., 2010), we argue that need for cognition provides individ-

uals with motivation to maintain personal initiative. People high in

need for cognition enjoy the cognitive input that is necessary to estab-

lish new goals, better plans, and better feedback processing when

entrepreneurs show self‐starting, future‐oriented, and persistent

behavior. Need for cognition should therefore reduce the tendencies

of individuals to fall back into noneffortful routinized behavior. It

might also counter the possible negative effect of personal initiative

maintenance on entrepreneurs' well‐being.

1

Need for cognition might

buffer the effects of stressors and fatigue that might come along with

efforts to keep up personal initiative, thereby reducing potential neg-

ative effects on entrepreneurs' well‐being.

This study aims to make three contributions. First, the study con-

tributes to the proactive motivation literature (Parker et al., 2010) by

showing how a cognitive interindividual characteristic—need for cog-

nition—provides motivation to maintain posttraining personal initiative

over time. Second, the study sheds further light on the consequences

of proactive behavior by investigating the role of maintenance of pro-

active behavior for individual well‐being and giving first insights into

need for cognition as interindividual factor that might impact this rela-

tionship. This is important because consequences of proactive behav-

ior on well‐being are understudied (Cangiano & Parker, 2016; Strauss,

Parker, & O'Shea, 2017), and existing studies mostly ignore the role of

intraindividual change in proactive behavior (for a recent exception,

see Zacher et al., in press). Third, the study contributes to the broader

training transfer literature (Baldwin & Ford, 1988; Blume et al., 2010)

as it is based on a sophisticated experimental field design with a large

sample size and four measurement waves over the course of 2 years

after training, which allows the investigation of training effects over

time. Our approach is rare in the field of training transfer research,

which does not take into account intraindividual changes in training

outcomes over time (Huang, Ford, & Ryan, 2016). Therefore, this

study answers the call for studies that “more conclusively examine

transfer maintenance”(Blume et al., 2010, p. 1097).

2|THE DECREASING EFFECT OF

PERSONAL INITIATIVE TRAINING OVER TIME

In line with the training transfer literature (Baldwin & Ford, 1988;

Blume et al., 2010; Grossman & Salas, 2011), we argue that

1

We are grateful to the action editor of this special issue for suggesting the rela-

tionships to well‐being to us.

MENSMANN AND FRESE 21