Call for paper: Emotions, Emotionality, and Entrepreneurship

Emotions, Emotionality, and Entrepreneurship

Against its backdrop of uncertainty, the entrepreneurship process and journey involves a potentially intense emotional experience (e.g., Schindehutte et al., 2006). The entrepreneur’s emotionality can also involve emotional intelligence, passion, and socioemotional wealth (e.g. Hsieh, 2025). Over the last two decades, the research effort and output on emotions and emotionality have exploded; currently, several hundred articles in leading journals can be found having addressed their nature. According to the EBSCO database, only 14 peer reviewed articles published in 2005 combined the search terms “entrep* and (emotion* or affective)” in the abstract; that number rose to 47 in 2015 and then 117 in 2024. As advances in technology (such as Generative AI) stimulate and enliven the entrepreneurial process while also adding to its uncertainty, emotion is in the position to play increasingly influential roles. The goal of this special issue is to draw attention to the increasingly wide-ranging and dynamic effects of emotion and emotionality, across the entrepreneurship process and entrepreneurial journey.

We identify below a handful of themes that are especially timely for this Special Issue.

Emotion and opportunity formation. In spite of recommended alternatives, the distinction between opportunity discovery and opportunity creation still serves as a popular entrepreneurship framework (e.g., Alvarez and Barney, 2007). For opportunity discovery, the entrepreneurship process fundamentally relates to a search process, creatively combining and configuring resources according to technologically known processes (Hsieh et al., 2007). Here, the entrepreneur’s empathy is valuable, taking others’ perspectives and feeling others’ emotions (e.g., Khalid and Sekiguchi, 2018; Packard and Burnham, 2021). For opportunity creation, the entrepreneur’s empathy becomes far less crucial; instead, the entrepreneur must know how to campaign socio-politically to convince the market that his product or service addresses a problem that it was not already aware of (see Tocher et al., 2015). How do we make sense of the entrepreneur’s emotional task when discovering versus creating opportunity?

Emotion and the judgment-based approach. Entrepreneurship may not necessarily center on the concept of ‘opportunity’, especially insofar that entrepreneurs recognize that the set of available opportunities is dynamically changing over time. In this case judgment may be the more important consideration (Foss and Klein, 2012). The academic concept of ‘judgment and decision-making’ has been around since the 1960’s (Edwards, 1961), and the examination of the effects of emotion thereof came soon after. More work can be done to examine the effects of emotion on entrepreneurial judgment without resorting to discussion of opportunity. For example, how might discrete emotions (e.g., fear, hope, and regret) bias or sharpen entrepreneurial judgment when no clear opportunity is available to evaluate? How do emotions affect entrepreneurs’ willingness to take personal responsibility for decisions they cannot outsource?

Moral emotion in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is not only a highly social process, but also one characterized by high stakes. There is much room for dubious or deceptive behavior. At the same time, entrepreneurs also have ethical responsibilities not only to themselves but also others (esp. family, employees, investors, and customers: Dees, 2012; Hong et al., 2021; Jiang and Min, 2023; Kreutzer, 2022; McVea, 2009). Moral emotions such as guilt, shame or pride can readily emerge (Goss, 2005; Smollan and Singh, 2024). How do these interact with entrepreneurial passion and its associated identities? How can we make sense of those emotions, and how might entrepreneurs manage them as they emerge? What happens when these emotions emerge alongside the entrepreneur’s passion? What kinds of feedback effects arise? When do entrepreneurs re-frame their cognition to change their emotions, and when do they end up choosing to mix positive and negative emotions? What are the consequences of either strategy?

Serendipity and emotions in entrepreneurship. Recent work has investigated the theoretical value of serendipitous moments in management and entrepreneurship (Busch, 2024; Oo et al., 2025). Serendipity is potentially a behavioral outcome of the epistemic emotion of surprise, which itself has been broached by Kirzner (1997). How does serendipity relate to the willingness to be surprised? Is it something more? How can we meaningfully tie serendipity and its emotional antecedents to the various forms of uncertainty?

Entrepreneurial emotion and AI. AI can have profound effects on entrepreneurship (e.g., Chalmers et al., 2021; Shepherd and Majchrzak, 2022). How will advancements in AI alter entrepreneurial opportunities and entrepreneurial emotionality, and their interplay? What are the implications for locus of control in terms of the roles of passion and fear of failure? Will entrepreneurs be less anxious about stigma and fear failure less when so many decisions are put in the hands of AI agents to make?

Physiology and neuroscience of entrepreneurial emotion. Physiological (hormonal, stress, and recovery) and neuroscientific (brain activation and neurotransmitters) measures can be used to study emotional and affective dimensions of entrepreneurship (Nicolaou et al., 2021). What are the limitations in measuring real-time emotion and the limitations in interpreting the data collection?

The interaction of narcissism and passion. The entrepreneurship literature has tackled both narcissism and passion (e.g., Cardon et al., 2013; Leung et al., 2021); the latter is typically associated with the “heart” while the former is usually associated with the ego. To better make sense of the interaction between the entrepreneur’s ego and heart, we can start with passion and narcissism. For example, performance feedback has been shown to affect passion (e.g., Lee et al., 2024) but it may also fuel narcissism. More generally, what simultaneously affects both passion and narcissism, how do passion and narcissism feed into each other, and how can one sabotage the benefits associated with the other?

While the above themes can certainly be notable, there is a wide array of other research topics that can be tied to emotions and emotionality in this Special Issue, as outlined and addressed by Hsieh (2025), including but not limited to, the following: Individual-level attributes; formation and evaluation processes of entrepreneurial opportunity; motivation and intention; action, exploitation, and performance; exit; passion; stress, negative emotion, and burnout; teamwork and its leadership; family-related entrepreneurship contexts; the management of external stakeholders; social entrepreneurship; and regional or national environments.

Submission and Review Process

This Special Issue opens for submissions on 1st April 2026, and the submission deadline is 1st October 2026. Papers will be screened by the guest editors, and those deemed suitable will be sent to at least two reviewers. Papers will be reviewed on a rolling basis and those accepted will be available online (EarlyCite) before the Special Issue is finalized. Manuscripts must apply the NEJE’s general author guidelines, such as style and paper length. We welcome newly introduced types of articles: Research Note and Practitioner Note. All papers must go through the journal’s online submission portal (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/neje). Authors should select ‘SI: Emotions, Emotionality, and Entrepreneurship’ option when submitting their manuscript.