Identifying the main Individual Factors Influencing Entrepreneurial Decision making Biases: A Qualitative Content Analysis Approach

Entrepreneurial decisions are one of the most important functions of entrepreneurs so as to manage their ventures on a daily basis. These decisions are not fully rational and because of various factors like cognitive and personal characteristics, environmental and firm-related issues, entrepreneurial decisions are prone to biases. Decision making biases has become a favorable research topic among entrepreneurial scholars. Decision making biases are responsible for lots of entrepreneurial successes as well as failures. Being the conjunction of entrepreneurship, management and psychology, there is some ambiguity regarding the main factors influencing the genesis of these biases among entrepreneurs. By reviewing the body of literature on factors affecting these biases, one comes to the conclusion that individual factors play the major role in this regard. Coming to the conclusion that there are some gaps regarding the nature of these individual factors, this paper conducted a qualitative content analysis approach by studying entrepreneurial narratives resulting from interviews with 20 entrepreneurs. According to our findings, self-efficacy, personal optimism and risk taking propensity are the main individual factors influencing the genesis of entrepreneurial decision making biases.