The Antecedents of Serial Entrepreneurship: the Role of Entrepreneurs’ Narcissism and Human Capital

Extant researches highlighted controversial results regarding the relation between serial entrepreneurs, i.e. those who started business sequentially (Wright, et al., 2007), and start-ups' growth and survival. The prior entrepreneurial experience of serial entrepreneurs enhances the opportunity Identification capability and the easiness in acquiring financial resources because of their credibility. Instead, over time, serial entrepreneurs show decreasing performance because they might have difficulty in apply prior experiential learning in subsequent ventures. While research has provided a strong general understanding of what motivates individuals to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas, the psychological antecedents that might affect the individual decision to become a serial entrepreneur are still unexplored and untested. Such insight is the aim of this paper: we examine the psychological antecedents, focusing on the entrepreneur's narcissism and human capital (HC). Compared to the other personality traits, narcissism has been found to be prevalent among the top management team and the strategic choices made by narcissistic entrepreneurs differ systematically from those of their non-narcissistic counterparts (i.e., the firsts prefer bold and highly visible initiatives, rather than incremental elaborations on the status quo). Pertaining 1C, namely intangible resources and capabilities that enhance the firm's value creation, we focus on the human capital dimension considering the entrepreneurs' levels of education and entrepreneurs' experience; we suppose that they can positively mediate the relationship between entrepreneur's narcissism and serial entrepreneurial experience. Using a cross-industry sample of 343 start-ups' entrepreneurs, we show that entrepreneurs with a high level of narcissism are likely serial entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs' experience positively mediates the above relationship. Our study makes significant contributions to the research on entrepreneurship and 1C. We respond to calls for a more in-depth explaining of the relation between entrepreneurs' seriality and personality trait differences and we contribute to the discussion about the importance of the interaction between human capital and personality traits.