TY - JOUR

T1 - Post-failure impression management

T2 - A typology of entrepreneurs’ public narratives after business closure

AU - Kibler, Ewald

AU - Mandl, Christoph

AU - Farny, Steffen

AU - Salmivaara, Virva

N1 - The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support received from the Academy of Finland.

PY - 2021/2/1

Y1 - 2021/2/1

N2 - What are the strategies entrepreneurs apply to present business closure to public audiences? Most entrepreneurs choose to communicate venture failure publicly so as to foster a favorable impression of failure, in effect engaging in impression management to maintain and/or repair their professional reputation for future career actions. To date, however, the focus of most research has been on managing failure within organizational settings, where organizational actors can interact closely with their audiences. We know little about entrepreneurs’ strategies in presenting failure to public audiences in cases where they have limited opportunities for interaction. In response to this, we present an analysis of public business-closure statements to generate a typology of five venture-failure narratives—Triumph, Harmony, Embrace, Offset, and Show—that explains entrepreneurs’ distinct sets of impression-management strategies to portray failure in public. In conclusion, we theorize from our public venture-failure typology to discuss how our work advances understanding of the interaction between organizational failure, impression management, and entrepreneurial narratives.

AB - What are the strategies entrepreneurs apply to present business closure to public audiences? Most entrepreneurs choose to communicate venture failure publicly so as to foster a favorable impression of failure, in effect engaging in impression management to maintain and/or repair their professional reputation for future career actions. To date, however, the focus of most research has been on managing failure within organizational settings, where organizational actors can interact closely with their audiences. We know little about entrepreneurs’ strategies in presenting failure to public audiences in cases where they have limited opportunities for interaction. In response to this, we present an analysis of public business-closure statements to generate a typology of five venture-failure narratives—Triumph, Harmony, Embrace, Offset, and Show—that explains entrepreneurs’ distinct sets of impression-management strategies to portray failure in public. In conclusion, we theorize from our public venture-failure typology to discuss how our work advances understanding of the interaction between organizational failure, impression management, and entrepreneurial narratives.

KW - Business closure

KW - entrepreneurs

KW - impression management

KW - latent semantic analysis

KW - organizational failure

KW - typology

KW - Management studies

KW - Entrepreneurship

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85078113340&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1177/0018726719899465

DO - 10.1177/0018726719899465

M3 - Journal articles

AN - SCOPUS:85078113340

VL - 74

SP - 286

EP - 318

JO - Human Relations

JF - Human Relations

SN - 0018-7267

IS - 2

ER -