Fear of failure may inhibit entrepreneurs, but may also drive them to work harder

Expressing one’s fears may indicate weakness and might even be considered a taboo subject, especially in the sometimes rather ‘macho’ world of entrepreneurship. Even for scholars of motivation, fear of failure has never received as much attention as other more positive aspects of motivation. In the context of entrepreneurship, the dominant view is that fear serves only to inhibit entrepreneurial action. Yet this simplistic view is not consistent with persistent anecdotes that ‘fear of failure drives me on’. To better understand fear of failure, we thus establish what, exactly, fear of failure means in the context of entrepreneurship. We conducted a qualitative study to better understand the fear of failure phenomenon within the entrepreneurial process. We interviewed 65 entrepreneurs/potential entrepreneurs in the UK and Canada, asking them to describe their experience of fear of failure as they engage with entrepreneurship. We found that fear of failure cannot be described in simple binary terms. It has multiple dimensions. It is a combination of cognition, emotion and action that together combine into a process. That process determines how the experience of fear of failure is associated with both the motivation to approach and avoid situations, decisions and actions in the context of entrepreneurship