Seminario Rebel with a cause: Missionary founder identity development through self-transcendence

The seminar is reserved for the Department of Management’s community. Other interested colleagues can contact Leonardo Corbo (leonardo.corbo@unibo.it).

As calls for firms to focus on more than profit generation intensify, it becomes increasingly important to understand the antecedents of social entrepreneurial action. This study focuses on one such antecedent – a missionary founder identity. Although prior findings link this identity to a broad identification with all humanity, little is known about how it emerges. Our analysis of interviews with 42 founders with missionary identity uncovers the importance of other (interdependent) factors such as self-actualization and reflexivity and yields a two-phase model of missionary founder identity development. The first phase, self-formation, involves self-actualization and expanding identification with all humanity, leading to a nonconformist definition of success. In the second phase, self-transcendence, this definition of success unlocks a generative space where individuals decide to exercise voice (protest against status quo) and formulate social problems to be addressed through new ventures. Our study informs research on founder identities and social entrepreneurial action and provides insights into experiences essential for enabling more “rebels with a cause”.

Short biography

Anastasia Sergeeva is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bath. Her research centers on entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as human and AI reasoning. She conducts research at the intersection of entrepreneurship, strategy, and Organization Theory. She is particularly interested in an interpretative understanding of entrepreneurial reasoning and value-laden aspects of innovating and organizing. Her research is philosophically undergirded by American Pragmatism, which she also draws on in her work on theorizing in management studies.