Beyond psychology and environment explanations: a linguistic microfoundation approach to entrepreneurs’ anxiety

Abstract

We offer a novel theoretical account of why entrepreneurs experience anxiety and how entrepreneurs cope with anxiety. We integrate insights from linguistic theories into entrepreneurship literature to propose that entrepreneurs’ linguistic architecture—particularly the vocabulary their language provides for identifying and describing emotions (i.e., its emotion lexicon)—is an essential linguistic microfoundation that systematically shapes how entrepreneurs process and experience anxiety. As moderators, we examine how bilingualism and entrepreneurial experience can systematically alter how entrepreneurs’ linguistic architecture influences their anxiety. Our final sample was 1,251 entrepreneurs speaking 14 different languages, supplemented by an experimental study with 202 bilingual entrepreneurs in Hong Kong. We find that entrepreneurs with a richer vocabulary for identifying and describing emotions (i.e., a richer emotion lexicon) heighten anxiety due to more precise and vivid emotional processing, and bilingualism weakens, yet prior entrepreneurial experience strengthens the positive effect of emotion lexicon on anxiety.