Empathy-driven entrepreneurial action: Well-being outcomes for entrepreneurs and target beneficiaries

Abstract

Empathy is a primary driver of social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial action. However, empathizing individuals can arrive at different conclusions about what targets need. This variance in entrepreneurs' empathy for targets is important because it will help explain the type of interventions they initiate to help targets and the production of a range of benefits and costs for the targets and the entrepreneur. This study builds on and extends the theory of empathic interpersonal emotion regulation to construct an empathy-driven entrepreneurial-action model of well-being. We explore how an entrepreneur's empathy orientation for entrepreneurial action—the patterned way entrepreneurs focus their attention on a target's problems and then seek to enact this position through entrepreneurial action to help the target—shapes the organizing of an entrepreneurial intervention and the likely outcomes. We theorize entrepreneurial orientation of entrepreneurial action manifests as a hedonic paternalistic, counterhedonic, paternalistic, hedonic cooperative, or counter-hedonic cooperative. This empathy-driven entrepreneurial-action model of well-being contributes to the social entrepreneurship literature and inter-personal theories of empathy.