How Coping Combination Affects Innovation Ambidexterity in Business Failure Situations

Jinliang Chen; Feng Jiang; Song Lin

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01409

How Coping Combination Affects Innovation Ambidexterity in Business Failure Situations

Front Psychol. 2020 Jul 14:11:1409. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01409. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Jinliang Chen¹, Feng Jiang¹, Song Lin¹

Affiliation

¹ School of Business, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing, China.

Abstract

As an effective cognitive and behavioral strategy, coping helps to overcome negative events. Although coping and its effects have been widely studied in psychology, little is known about the combination of entrepreneurs' coping and its connection with firms' innovation ambidexterity. To fill these gaps, in this study, the authors collected 106 samples through two serial-wave surveys of the Bohai Economic Rim in China and tested the theoretical hypotheses using polynomial regression with response surface analysis. The results showed that alignment coping combination enhanced innovation ambidexterity by reshaping an entrepreneur's cognitive structure. Misalignment coping combination was found to enhance innovation ambidexterity by eliciting an entrepreneur's different types of information processing systems. This study contributes to the literatures of coping, innovation ambidexterity, and upper echelons theory from the entrepreneurial cognition approach.

Keywords: business failure; coping combination; entrepreneurial cognition; innovation ambidexterity; loss orientation coping; restoration orientation coping.