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This study aims to explore the behavioral patterns of entrepreneurs, their cognitive styles and personality characteristics that can lead to a self-destructive chain of events during the transition from a fledgling business to one capable of long-term, profitable growth. This study adopts the self-regulation attitude theory to uncover the reasons for premature start-up scaling, which will help founders to study on their cognitive biases, emotions and behaviors and make efforts to do what does not come naturally to them.

The respondents for this qualitative study were selected from a group of entrepreneurs with extensive experience with technology start-ups that have either failed or succeeded during their development stages. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight participants, who were selected through snowball sampling, on the theme of understanding “How do premature scaling mistakes happen?”. Thematic analysis was used to unearth common themes.

The results of this study identified the following themes, “comparison,” “emotional over-reaction,” “impatience,” “mistaken customer priorities,” “overestimation” and “overconfidence,” which eventually leads to premature scaling. The underlying decision-making heuristics of entrepreneurs can be identified as engulfed in different cognitive biases and emotions resulting in negative behavioral patterns, as in the case of premature scaling. Of the six themes, “comparison,” “mistaken customer priorities,” “overestimation” and “overconfidence relates to cognitive bias” and “emotional over-reaction” and “impatience” relate to emotional factors.

The study was made possible with the support of the voluntary participants chosen by purposive and snowballing data sampling. The interviewee and interviewer biases could have also crept in as part of this qualitative approach. The study pertains only to start-ups in the information technology sector and further studies need to be done to generalize the results across industries as well.

This early-stage underestimation of unexpected obstacles in the entrepreneurship journey necessitates a focus on the entrepreneur too, as much as the concept. In these hectic and fast-paced circumstances, aspiring entrepreneurs must be taught how to deal objectively with themselves and others, as well as think strategically. Leaders who scale do so because they take purposeful measures to overcome their weaknesses through self-discipline, soliciting advice from others and using their right to change their attitude and points of view.

The study frames the new approach into the entrepreneurial literature, linking it to self-regulation attitude theory and adds to the nascent literature on neuroentrepreneurship which discuss entrepreneurial cognition, decision-making, and entrepreneurial behavior. This study attempted to explore the reasons behind the premature scaling of startups on an individual level. This study is pioneering in exploring the cognitive factors underlying an entrepreneur’s decision that results in premature scaling. This study provides insights for academicians, entrepreneurs and policymakers and helps understand the cognitive journey that leads to premature scaling.

Searching for a job is an important process that influences short- and long-term career outcomes as well as well-being and psychological health. As such, job search research has grown tremendously over the last two decades. In this chapter, the authors provide an overview of prior research, discuss important trends in current research, and suggest areas for future research. The authors conceptualize the job search as an unfolding process (i.e., a process through which job seekers navigate through stages to achieve their goal of finding and accepting a job) in which job seekers engage in self-regulation behaviors. The authors contrast research that has taken a between-person, static approach with research that has taken a within-person, dynamic approach and highlight the importance of combining between- and within-person designs in order to have a more holistic understanding of the job search process. Finally, authors provide some recommendations for future research. Much remains to be learned about what influences job search self-regulation, and how job self-regulation influences job search and employment outcomes depending on individual, contextual, and environmental factors.

Self-regulation skills, such as organisation, self-evaluation, personal elaboration, metacognitive attitude and strategic awareness are very important predictors of academic achievement. However, research has not studied in depth the factors that facilitate the use of good self-regulatory skills. The present research was intended to study the role of some factors that could affect these self-regulation skills, in particular depressive attitude and motivational beliefs. A group of 246 adolescents, aged between 14 and 18, were administered self-report questionnaires devised to test aspects underlying self-regulation. A preliminary factor analysis confirmed the centrality of the three-hypothesised aspects: motivational beliefs, depressive attitude, and self-regulation-skills. A path analysis revealed that there are important links between motivational beliefs and self-regulation and between depressive attitude and motivational beliefs. Some educational implications are discussed.

Any career is marked by luck, both good and bad, as well as by hard work interspersed by times of uncertainty, fits and starts, and learning from one's mistakes and successes. But beyond these outcomes and actions, I owe an enormous debt to people who have shaped me and made life the challenging and rewarding journey it is. My family of origin and extended family were incredibly supportive in personal and functional ways. So many mentors and teachers influenced what I know and who I am. Many students, colleagues, secretaries, computer and library staff, and group chairs and deans provided the help, inspiration, and friendship guiding my career behind the scenes. My wife, son, and daughter sustained me through times of tears and joy, as did my community of faith. All these relationships were foundational to any contributions I may have made to attitudes, social action, and theory of mind; methodology, statistics, and philosophical foundations of research; sales force, organization, and health behaviors; emotions, ethics, and moral behavior; and marketing and managerial practice. For me, my career contributions are secondary to the relationships within which I was fortunate to engage.

This study aims to investigate the effect of healthy food advertising (HFA) in preventing obesity (measured using the healthy eating attitude and perceived self-regulatory success) through the meta-cognitive role of consumer wisdom (CW). The meta-cognitive role of CW to better promote healthy eating attitude and behavior is relevant and underexplored.

Data were collected from 310 young consumers through an online survey. Reliability and validity were established using confirmatory factor analysis, and hypotheses were analyzed through structural equation modeling using MPlus V8.3.

The results reveal that HFA has a positive influence on all dimensions of CW: responsibility, purpose, perspective, reasoning and sustainability. All dimensions but one augment a positive healthy eating attitude, but only responsibility and sustainability enhance consumers’ self-regulatory success. The findings show that HFA does not directly prevent obesity, but CW mediates the relationship between that advertising and obesity prevention. These findings show that CW establishes a mindful connection between HFA and obesity control.

This research extends the theory of CW in the context of healthful eating and contributes significantly to the advertising, hospitality and obesity literature.

This study also has implications for multiple stakeholders, including consumers, restaurant operators, hospitality managers, brand managers, the government and society in general.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study marks the first attempt to investigate the role of CW in preventing obesity. It is also the first study to examine the relationships of HFA with CW and a healthful attitude toward eating.

The purpose of the present paper is to advance a testable model, rooted on well‐established control and self‐regulation theory principles, explaining the causal links between change‐related sensemaking, interpretation, readiness and subsequent behavioural action.

Following a review of the two motivation theories and clarification of change‐related sensemaking, interpretation, and readiness concepts, the paper proposes a series of research propositions (illustrated by a conceptual model) clarifying how these concepts interact with self‐regulating mechanisms. In addition, the feedback model exemplifies how cognitive processes triggered by new knowledge structures relate to behavioural action.

The model expands upon other existing frameworks by allowing the examination of multi‐level factors that account for, and moderate causal links between, change‐related sensemaking, interpretation, readiness, and behavioural action. Suggestions for future research and guidelines for practice are outlined.

The variables and processes depicted in the model provide guidelines for change management in organisations, both for individuals and for groups. By eliciting important self‐regulating functions, change agents will likely facilitate sensemaking processes, positive interpretations of change, change readiness, and effective change behaviours.

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, it offers a comprehensive and dynamic account of the relationships between change‐related sensemaking, interpretation, readiness, and behavioural action decision‐making. Second, it elucidates the impact of human agency properties, namely the interplay of efficacy perceptions, social learning, and self‐regulating mechanisms on these change‐related cognitive processes and subsequent behavioural outcomes.

In accordance with the commitment–trust theory, employee attitudes and behaviours mediate the impact of empowerment on service recovery performance. The purpose of this paper is to extend the self-regulating process model and develop a structural framework that combines empowerment, self-regulation mechanisms (service recovery awareness, job engagement and emotional exhaustion) and post-recovery satisfaction. This framework explores how empowerment can lead to action of frontline employees (FLEs) in service recovery.

The authors test the hypotheses by investigating 290 pairs of FLEs and customers, who have service failure experience in the express mail industry, using structure equation modelling.

The findings show that empowerment enhances both service recovery awareness and job engagement. On the one hand, service recovery awareness has a positive impact on emotional exhaustion, which has a negative impact on post-recovery satisfaction. On the other hand, job engagement has a positive impact on performance. These results provide the whole picture of the double-edged effects of empowerment on FLEs in service recovery.

This paper indicates that managers should re-consider approaches to empowerment based on self-regulation process to enhance performance following service failure.

This study explores the dark side of empowerment in service recovery from a self-regulation perspective.

For work organizations and their members, establishing and maintaining mutually satisfying employment relationships is a fundamental concern. The importance that scholars attach to employment relationships is reflected in research streams that explore the optimal design of strategic human resource management systems, the nature of psychological contract fulfillment and violation, and the factors associated with achieving person-environment fit, among others. Generally missing from theory and research pertaining to employment relationships is the perspective of individuals who reside at the employee-employer interface – managerial leaders. We argue that, for managerial leaders, a pervasive concern involves the tangible and intangible resource requirements of specific employees. We then provide the groundwork for study of the leader’s perspective on employment relationships by proposing a model that identifies how employees come to be perceived as low versus high maintenance and how these perceptions, in turn, influence leader cognition, affect, and behavior.

While emotions and feelings arise in the singular personality, they may also develop a normative dimensionality in a plural agency. The authors identify the cybernetic systemic principles of how emotions might be normatively regulated and affect plural agency performance. The purpose of this paper is to develop a generic cultural socio-cognitive trait theory of plural affective agency (the emotional organization), involving interactive cognitive and affective traits, and these play a role within the contexts of Mergers and Acquisitions (M & A).

The authors integrate James Gross’ model of emotion regulation with the earlier work on normative personality in the context of Mindset Agency Theory. The agency is a socio-cognitive entity with attitude, and operates through traits that control thinking and decision making. These traits are epistemically independent and operate on a bipolar scale; with the alternate poles having an auxiliary function to each other – where the traits may take intermediary “balanced” states between the poles.

Processes of affect regulation are supposed to go through three stages: first, identification (affective situation awareness); second, elaboration of affect is constituted through schemas of emotional feeling, which include emotion ideologies generating emotional responses to distinct contextual situations; third, execution: in the operative system primary emotions are assessed through operative intelligence for any adaptive information and the capacity to organize action; and turned into action, i.e. responses, through cultural feeling rules and socio-cultural display rules, conforming to emotion ideologies.

This new theory provides guidance for framing multilevel interaction where smaller collectives (as social systems) are embedded into larger social systems with a culture, an emotional climate and institutions. Thus, it is providing a generic theoretical frame for M & A analyses, where a smaller social unit (the acquired) is to be integrated into a larger social unit (the acquirer).

Understanding interdependencies between cognition and emotion regulation is a prerequisite of managerial intelligence, which is at demand during M & A processes. While managerial intelligence may be grossly defined as the capacity of management to find an appropriate and fruitful balance between action and learning orientation of an organization, its affective equivalent is the capacity of management to find a fruitful balance between established emotion expression and learning alternate forms of emotion expression.

Understanding interdependencies between cognition and emotion is a prerequisite of social, cultural and emotional intelligence. The provided theory can be easily linked with empirical work on the emergence of a cultural climate of fear within societies. Thus, “Affective Agency Theory” also has a bearing for political systems’ analysis, what, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.

The paper builds on the recently developed Mindset Agency Theory, elaborating it through the introduction of the dimension of affect, where cognitive and affective traits interact and become responsible for patterns of behaviour. The model is providing a framework which links emotion expression and emotion regulation with cognitive analysis.