Fear is something that we all face and in every walk of life. But what about the fears particular to entrepreneurs? How do these hold them back from achieving and what can entrepreneurs do to overcome them? Prof. James Hayton, Warwick Business School, shares his insights from recently published research

From an interview with Prof. Adrian Zicari, ESSEC Business School. Related research: Entrepreneurial fear of failure: Scale development and validation, Gabriella Cacciotti, James C. Hayton, J. Robert Mitchell, David G. Allen; Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier.

Fear: Not just the concern of a few

Adrian Zicari: Professor James Hayton from Warwick Business School, welcome. So happy to have you here. I’d like to talk with you about a recent paper of yours in the Journal of Business Venturing about entrepreneurs’ fear of failure. Indeed, many people, both young and older, express the wish to become entrepreneurs and start their own companies but it can be daunting. 

James Hayton: That’s right – and it’s why we started a study because initially, the conception was that fear of failure does stop people from becoming entrepreneurs. It’s been the dominant view in research and the wider press, but it seemed incomplete because if it were true that people with fear didn’t become entrepreneurs – then quite simply entrepreneurs wouldn’t have fear.

And of course, that’s not true. You could say the same for sports people or performing artists. Some people overcome their fears. If we’re going to understand how people overcome their fears, we needed to have a theory of fear of failure that could be used to understand how people respond across the whole process of entrepreneurship, of identifying ideas, and then trying to reduce uncertainty around those ideas, being able to get investors – in fact, all of the different dimensions of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship and fear: One step beyond

James Hayton: So we needed to go beyond the idea that fear of failure stops people from becoming entrepreneurs. We started with that 10 years ago now, and we have interviewed scores of entrepreneurs over that time to build a framework to understand what they were afraid of. The end result is that we found there were seven different elements, dimensions of fear of failure, and everybody’s different.

Some people are afraid of letting other people down, some people are afraid of whether they’ve got the skills to develop the idea, and others are afraid if the idea is any good – everybody’s experience is different. We needed a way to measure that fear, and that experience of fear, to be able to test our theories.

As such, that’s what this paper is about. It’s a multi-sample study where we develop and test the validity of the measure, and also to check if measures what we think it measures? I must give credit to my PhD student at the time who’s now long graduated, Gabriella Cacciotti, because she did a lot of the hard work in that paper.

Motivating – but at what cost?

Adrian Zicari: It’s very important to emphasise, as you mentioned, that entrepreneurs can to some extent control, master or even prevent their fears from taking over.

James Hayton: Exactly. If we want to be able to help people understand their own fears around starting up a business and the different dimensions of that, we have to be able to pinpoint what those things are that they’re afraid of. We’re also interested in questions such as does fear stop you from doing something, or sometimes does it make you more motivated? Because in some situations we actually say: “Well, we’re afraid, we’re going to try harder, we’re going to strive harder not to fail.” Fear, in that case, drives us on – but is that healthy? If you’re motivated by fear, is it more stressful? Do you tend to focus on the wrong goals? Do you persist when you shouldn’t persist? And what about your mental well-being, your subjective well-being?

These are all things that we wanted to study, and we needed a measure that we could sample across lots of entrepreneurs and study their behaviours and their decisions – and hopefully this is a platform for that research.

Adrian Zicari: Many people reading this interview might by now be wanting to read your research paper. What message could you give to them?

James Hayton: Well, the message from the paper is that we confirm that there are distinct dimensions of fear of failure. Each dimension has a different impact on the outcomes. Fear does motivate as well as inhibit. And in some circumstances it can have positive outcomes, but it can also have negative outcomes.

I think the key thing is that we all have fear in all aspects of our lives, sooner or later. One of the entrepreneurs that I met with a multi-billion-dollar business, said: “In fact, the fear gets stronger, it doesn’t get weaker. It gets stronger because you have more people depending upon you, and the decisions are much bigger.”

So, in entrepreneurship but also in a more general sense, we all have to learn to accommodate and have courage, and we can all have courage. It’s easier if you understand specifically what your threats are and then you can manage those externally and within yourself.

Useful links:

• Link up with Profs. James Hayton and Adrian Zicari on LinkedIn
• Read a related article: Into the lives of women entrepreneurs in Brazil
• Discover Warwick Business School
• Apply for the Warwick MBA / EMBA.

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