Abstract
Due to the importance of entrepreneurial self-efficacy in deciding the fate of a venture, failing to understand what shapes entrepreneurs’ role breadth self-efficacy and its subsequent influence on strategic choices may be costly for new ventures. We adopt the “broaden and build” theory to argue that positive affect compared to negative affect will enhance entrepreneurs’ role breadth self-efficacy. Because perceived ability to perform variety of tasks beyond the job demand facilitates exploration of new opportunities and exploitation of existing resources, we further predict that higher role breadth self-efficacy, in turn, leads to better ambidexterity skills in entrepreneurs. Two between-subject experiments (N=130) support our predictions. We contribute to entrepreneurs’ emotion and cognition literature by exploring the association between affect valence and role breadth self-efficacy. We also offer a novel contribution to new venture ambidexterity literature by providing an affective-cognitive understanding of individual ambidexterity.