In addition to this push motivation, my (Dean) colleague and I (Haynie and Shepherd 2011) uncovered psychological needs that attract these individuals to entrepreneurship as a career. People are often pulled to entrepreneurial careers due to a fundamental need for competence as well as the need to be seen as competent by others. Our participants discussed the appeal of being seen as a person who can make something great from nothing and can provide for employees, and some talked about entrepreneurship as an opportunity to show that they have the capabilities needed to be successful.
More pertinent to trauma-induced identity change are the two pull motivations that seem to differentiate between individuals who are well adjusted (i.e., coping well with their new life outside their previous career) and those who are less well adjusted. These pull motivations include the desire for security and espoused excitement /passion over the emerging vocational identity. Security is a fundamental human need, and for individuals who have not developed an identity foundation, it appears that an entrepreneurial career can fulfill this need (Haynie and Shepherd 2011). Interestingly, while some individuals mentioned they were pulled toward entrepreneurship because of the security it offers, this pull motivation was practically absent among individuals who were well adjusted (Haynie and Shepherd 2011).
Another pull motivation identified was an espoused passion for entrepreneurship and its related aspects. Similar to security, this pull motivation distinguishes between individuals based on how well adjusted they are. Each of the participants who had adjusted well after their traumatic experience noted passion as being a key pull toward entrepreneurship. For well-adjusted individuals, espoused passion for entrepreneurship directs their attention away from the past (i.e., their trauma) and away from the present (i.e., barriers created by their disability) such that a future orientation has formed. Instead of having a detailed plan for their life, these individuals’ pull motivation enables their new identity to develop; it has not yet been fully determined. This outcome contrasts to the outcomes of less well-adjusted individuals. Individuals who have adjusted less well to their trauma are focused more on the present, and the need for security—namely, their need to find a path that will lead them to tomorrow—is greater than the more abstract idea of an imagined future along a new path. Having no identity foundation, these individuals believe that their futures are more or less pre-determined by the outside factors, that they have no control over it. As a result, individuals who are less well adjusted often continue to feel some hopelessness, believing they are on the same path with insurmountable barriers ahead.
Competence Transference
An additional consideration in this context of trauma and entrepreneurship is the connection between the far and more recent past and the future as it relates to transference of competences—namely, taking the knowledge and competencies one learns in one context and successfully applying them in another context (e.g., entrepreneurship). The career literature frequently talks about cognitions to transfer vocational competences (e.g., knowledge, skills, and abilities) from the past to the present/future (Carless 2005; Edwards 1991; O’Reilly et al. 1991). My (Dean) colleague and I (Haynie and Shepherd 2011) uncovered two types of competence transference in our study. These types differentiated those who adjusted successfully from those who failed to adjust: (1) career competence transference, which includes applying the competencies one acquired from a previous to a burgeoning new career , and (2) coping competence transference, which includes applying the knowledge, skills, and abilities one developed from coping with a traumatic experience to a burgeoning new career .
For well-adjusted individuals, the data revealed the connections between the past, present, and future related to applying acquired competences to their new emerging career were readily obvious. Aaron, for instance, discussed how he learned to be disciplined in the military, and how this competence was beneficial in entrepreneurship: “And ultimately I think probably the biggest factor is discipline, because I think you have to have discipline to be able to follow through with any of it. Beyond the discipline, if you don’t have discipline it’s not going to happen. I would just guess that if you look at some of the most successful people, it comes down to discipline.” Likewise, other well-adjusted participants had a strong tendency to link the prior skills and knowledge they learned about themselves and others when coping with their trauma to their burgeoning entrepreneurial identity and venture. For example, Aaron said that having to cope with trauma helped him realize his personal strengths: “You know what? All that shit that happened to me I would never take it back; I would never trade it. Not that I could to go through it again, but I am what I am today because of the things that happened before.” In addition, my (Dean) colleague and I (Haynie and Shepherd 2011) found that rather than submissively assuming transference, well-adjusted individuals concentrated on the competences they had developed in the past and ways they could utilize those competences in the future. In order to accomplish this transfer, they thought about their prior competences in a more abstract way—namely, more structurally, more generalizably, and more portably.
In contrast, individuals who were less well adjusted (1) felt that they had learned few skills in the military that could help in their new career , suggesting instead that they had a “competence disadvantage” because of their past career experiences ; (2) noted fewer skills stemming from coping with their trauma ; and (3) concentrated on the surface-level mismatch between their past (in this case, being in the military and coping with trauma ) and their future career .
Entrepreneurship as a Means of Identity Play
As discussed above, while people usually value their career and the associated identity, events occasionally result in the termination of that identity altogether (Ebaugh 1988; Latack and Dozier 1986; Latack et al. 1995), thus requiring such people to re-create that part of the self . Recent identity research has investigated identity play as a means to transition to new identities (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010; Mainemelis and Ronson 2006; Savin-Baden 2010; Schrage 1999; Winnicott 1975) as such play liberates individuals from the constraints of behavioral consistency to explore different notions of a future self (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010; Mainemelis and Ronson 2006).
Early research on identity play (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010) has argued that individuals must have access to a quite safe place to experiment with potential identities (Ibarra 2004; Kets de Vries and Korotov 2007). However, an “involuntary career transition, sparked by an unexpected job loss, may not provide sufficient psychological safety to allow for identity play” (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010: 20). More specifically, individuals who experience work-related losses (e.g., failed entrepreneurs; Shepherd 2003) frequently feel grief —the negative emotional reaction in response to losing something important—and then go through a time of liminality (Ashforth 2001) during which they “struggle to establish a ‘new normal’ around the changed sense of self ” (Conroy and O’Leary-Kelly 2014). Such loss often threatens individuals’ sense of self because they generally feel a disconnect between their current and future work identities and then have to “take stock, re-evaluate, revise, re-see, and re-judge” their work identity (Strauss 1997: 102). Although important, transitioning from one work identity to another is usually challenging because one must not only give up an old identity but also create a new one.
Hitting Rock Bottom and Realizing a Lost Identity
Losing a business can make some entrepreneurs believe that their current situation in life is quite negative. This belief often makes the entrepreneur feel that he or she has hit rock bottom. Hitting rock bottom refers to a crystallization of discontent based on the development of “associative links among a multitude of unpleasant, unsatisfactory, and otherwise negative features of one’s current life situation” (Baumeister 1991: 281–282). The effect of hitting rock bottom is significant, indicating that a threshold was reached that generated “a large mass of negative features” strong enough to “undermine a person’s co
mmitment to a role, relationship, or involvement” and that unrelated reservations or negative feelings were insufficient in undermining that commitment (Baumeister 1994: 282).3 For instance, an entrepreneur may view certain negative events (e.g., missed sales forecasts, supply chain problems) as isolated events that are standard barriers to ultimately reaching success. After the crystallization of discontent, however, the entrepreneur may see these same events as part of a broad failure pattern that comes with his or her entrepreneurial role.
Regardless of efforts to safeguard themselves from the negative feedback associated with their life situations, entrepreneurs may begin to see “bad days turning into bad years,” causing them to believe that their future will probably “contain much of the same” (Bauer et al. 2005: 1182). Hitting rock bottom in this way—because one has formed associative connections between the negative features and outcomes of their lives—triggers a number of problems (Baumeister 1994) that ultimately bring negativity to a climax such that the individual’s commitment to his or her role is changed in a fundamental way. For instance, many people have recounted hitting rock bottom over dissatisfaction with religious groups (Jacobs 1984; Wright 1984), marriage (Vaughan 1990), and criminal behavior (Paternoster and Bushway 2009).
Hitting rock bottom generates an emotional crisis, or an extremely negative state that people want to escape from (Jacobs 1984; Paternoster and Bushway 2009; Vaughan 1990; Wright 1984). When this occurs, the individual will likely see his or her life in a substantially different light, radically changing his or her perspectives on roles, commitments, and relationships that make up his or her life (Baumeister 1994; Maitlis 2009). A failed entrepreneur, for instance, may need to change relationships with certain friend groups (e.g., restrict or eliminate costly activities), alter financial commitments (e.g., sell expensive homes, more to a lower-cost neighborhood), and drop certain community memberships (e.g., country club, etc.), which can dramatically affect his or her everyday life (Newman 1988). On the other hand, individuals are unlikely to hit rock bottom when they lose a job that is not highly valued or can be easily regained/replaced and when losing that job is not seen as highly threatening. In such cases, my (Dean) colleague and I (Shepherd and Williams 2018) theorized that there is no crystallization of discontent that individuals need to escape .
Cognitive Deconstruction and Escaping Identity Loss
Some people face the crystallization of discontent from hitting rock bottom and overcome it through cognitive deconstruction (Twenge et al. 2003). More specifically, people may try to get away from the disconnect between their present and future work identities by decreasing their self-awareness and meaningful thought—that is, they can put themselves in a numb state (Dixon and Baumeister 1991). Similarly, cognitive deconstruction after hitting rock bottom is a state with no emotions (Pennebaker 1989; Twenge et al. 2003) because people actively evade their emotions (Baumeister 1990; Stillman et al. 2009), and it removes meaning from awareness as well as “blots out threatening implications . . . it is a refusal of insight and a denial of implications or contexts” (Baumeister 1990: 92). A cognitive deconstructive state is different from the emotions one feels from work-related loss before hitting rock bottom . More specifically, people who are in a deconstructed state are mainly cognizant of the self and their particular situation in terms of a constricted time perspective that narrowly focuses on the present (instead of the past or future), concrete actions and sensations at a superficial level (instead of more abstract, wide-ranging ideas at a higher level), and proximal goals (instead of distal goals from the past or about the future) (Baumeister 1990; Twenge et al. 2003). Through cognitive deconstruction, people can avoid thoughts related to the loss of their work identity and thus avoid the negative emotions that come with that loss (see Pennebaker 1989, 1993).
While deconstructed cognition eases the difficulties associated with identity loss, maintaining this cognitive state for a prolonged period of time is challenging due to the dysfunctional behaviors that come along with this state of mind, such as disinhibition (Baumeister and Vohs 2002), passivity (i.e., avoiding responsibility or self-assessment) (Ringel 1976), lack of emotion (Williams and Broadbent 1986), and irrational (rather than meaningful) thoughts (Neuringer 1972). Therefore, periods of an emotionless state are generally disrupted by periods of high negative emotions (Baumeister 1990; Wegner et al. 1986). Such spikes in negative emotions are particularly detrimental as people are unable to accurately evaluate the consequences of extreme actions , such as self-violence (Baumeister 1988) and even suicide (Baumeister 1990). Moreover, people have limited self-regulatory resources (Muraven and Baumeister 2000), so before long, the effort required to continue a deconstructed state becomes too exhausting (Kashdan and Breen 2007; Vohs et al. 2005). In turn, this exhaustion leads to higher levels of lethargy and passivity (Baumeister 1990; Twenge et al. 2003), perceptions that time is dragging (Twenge et al. 2003), and less genuine social interactions with others (John and Gross 2004; Kashdan and Breen 2007). When one reaches this state, his or her recovery process has been suspended (or not even really started), and the person begins to experience chronic dysfunction (Baumeister 1994; McIntosh and McKeganey 2000).
Recovering from Identity Loss Through Identity Play
Although identity loss can result in negative outcomes, a potential upside of such loss is the rare opportunity for people to reboot not only their careers (Zikic and Klehe 2006) but also their central work identity via identity play. The idea of “play” is somewhat similar to deconstructed cognition in that it offers an escape (although a very different kind of escape ) from one’s current reality (Csikszentmihalyi 1997). Play enables the individual to withdraw “from the reigning order and the necessities of the present and offers spaces for imagination, for creation, and for everyday creativity” (Hjorth 2005: 392; Kark 2011). Although similar to cognitive destruction in terms of enabling an escape , play provides a healthier route forward by triggering processes that will ultimately generate a new work identity that is positive (Shepherd and Williams 2018).
When people undertake identity play, they generate and engage provisional identities to determine whether they could serve as future identities (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010). In this context, provisional identities are temporary conceptualizations of the self that must be “refined with experience” to become lasting (Ibarra 1999: 767; see also Ibarra 2004). Importantly, identity play is not directed at a goal; rather, it centers on discovery, enjoyment, and “rehearsing future possibilities” (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010: 12; see also Csikszentmihalyi 1990; Miller 1973; Sutton-Smith 2009). The identities that result from such play are “trials for possible, but not yet fully elaborated” work identities (Ibarra 2005: 3). Identity play is the best context in which to create and explore temporary conceptualizations of the self as it is contextually positioned at the threshold of one’s current reality and future possibilities (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010: 11; Petriglieri and Petriglieri 2010). At this threshold, through identity play, individuals can explore alternatives without completely committing to them in the present; instead, these alternatives signify opportunities for the future (Winnicott 1975, 2001, 2005; Schrage 1999). People are likely to be very creative when thinking about various features of a prior identity that could be applied to a new identity or when forming entirely new possible concepts of the self . For instance, a failed entrepreneur may consider how the skills and knowledge he or she gained when founding a business could be utilized in a corporate setting, take exams to apply to law school, or undertake other low-risk exploration activities. When this occurs, hitting rock bottom frees the entrepreneur to actively investigate future possibilities (Shepherd and Williams 2018).
While identity play has a lot of potential updates, it needs to happen in a space that encourages exploring , discovering, and testing untried behaviors (Schrage 1999; Winnicott 1975, 2001, 2005). This space is not necessarily a physical place but a mindset, a mindset that is ready and willing to suspend or vi
olate traditional rules without worrying about outcomes, such as penalties or exclusion (Glynn 1994; Van Maanen and Schein 1979), or about “strings being attached” to actions (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010). Identity play also helps individuals move away from focusing on the past and present, thus liberating their identity from the weight and restrictions of validation in a social setting (Ibarra and Petriglieri 2010; Winnicott 1975, 2005). Unlike cognitive deconstruction, however, during identity play, the individual does not omit meaning making but instead investigates an array of potential future selves (Holzman 2009), thus facilitating identity creation and recovery (Shepherd and Williams 2018).
First, after they have hit rock bottom , people divert their focus away from the negative outcomes of identity loss in an effort to get away from the present (Jacobs 1984; Paternoster and Bushway 2009; Vaughan 1990; Wright 1984), which can help lessen negative affect (Baumeister 1994). By reducing negative emotions (Fredrickson 1998), play helps the individual escape without the constraint of a limited focus on well-rehearsed actions (e.g., identity protection or restructuring). As an escape oriented toward the future, identity play focuses on positive outcomes after hitting rock bottom that are manageable and help in creating a positive new work identity. Consider, for example, a founder whose venture has failed: he or she may escape the negative emotions caused by thinking about the failure through playing with alternative career options, concentrating on several positive future results (e.g., obtaining a secure corporate job with substantial benefits, considering jobs in non-profit organizations, etc.). This positive attention directed toward the future could be further strengthened as the entrepreneur thinks “I would have never considered and pursued these opportunities had my venture been successful.”
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