Attributes of legitimate venture failure impressions

Abstract

The current research investigates the effectiveness of impression management strategies available to entrepreneurs to foster social legitimacy with stakeholders following venture failure. We use a conjoint experiment to examine how different attributions of causes of failure influence the general public's legitimacy judgments. The most effective strategy proves to be the entrepreneurs distancing themselves from the failure, in that they attribute the failure to external factors that are not under the entrepreneurs' volitional control, and brought about by circumstances that are unlikely to reoccur. Our analysis also considers how the audience members' dispositional agreeableness and general self-efficacy influence judgment formation.