Paper Seminar: Competence Development and Resolution of Multiple Identity Conflicts

The Paper Seminar series is a perfect opportunity to get up to speed with the entrepreneurship research scene and meet and greet your fellow researchers.

We follow the traditional approach with 30-45 minutes of presentation, followed by comments and discussion.

Paper Abstract

The changing career trajectories often reflect acquisition of a new knowledge. These changes result in progression to more demanding roles and adoption of roles requiring broader responsibilities. However, management literature has shown that these progressions are often accompanied by emerging multiple role identity conflicts. The purpose of this paper is to explore how entrepreneurs resolve conflicts between multiple role identities; in particular which methods they employ to resolve these conflicts and how these methods influence subsequent development of entrepreneurial competences. To analyze this relationship we adopt the identity-based perspective. Our analyses find that entrepreneurs are likely to experience both strong professional, business owner/managerial and often also local role identities and that their ability to resolve potential conflicts between these roles is closely related to the kind of competencies they develop. Subsequently, in this paper we suggest that there can be an inherent conflict between on the one hand the role identity of a successful entrepreneur providing radically new offerings to the market and on the other hand the role identity of a businessperson well adapted to the rules of the game of the local arena. Furthermore, we propose that the emergence of entrepreneurial identity is the result of successful merger of both of the identities: professional/occupational and business owner/managerial.

Biography

Magdalena Markowska is a PhD candidate at the Jönköping International Business School, Sweden. She will defend her doctoral thesis in December 2011. Her research interests focus on entrepreneurial competence development, in particular the role that identity and social capital play in the learning process. She was engaged in a research programme EXPLORE funded by the Nordic Council, which focused on the economic importance of high quality restaurants in rural locations. She is currently visiting Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Strathclyde, UK thanks to grant from Jan Wallanders and Tom Hedelius Foundation.