Chaim Letwin

Betting on the Coachable Entrepreneur: Signaling and Social Exchange in Entrepreneurial Pitches

Given that stakeholders often commit more than capital to a startup, they commonly stress how important it is for entrepreneurs to be “coachable.” To date, however, coachability has received little attention in entrepreneurship research. We address this gap by first establishing the entrepreneurial coachability construct and validating a measurement scale. Then, drawing on social exchange and signaling theories, we develop and test a novel framework in which coachability influences a potential investor’s willingness to invest. We find that entrepreneurial coachability functions as a viable signal in a pitch setting, but this impact is conditional on the investor’s prior coaching experience.

Breaking the cycle of abusive supervision: How disidentification and moral identity help the trickle-down change course.

Studies show that abusive leader behaviors “trickle down” to lower organizational levels, but this research ignores that many abused supervisors do not perpetuate abuse by harming their own subordinates. Drawing on social-cognitive theory and related research, we suggest abused supervisors might defy rather than emulate their managers’ abusive behavior. Specifically, we predicted that some abused supervisors—namely, those with strong moral identities—might in effect “change course” by engaging in less abuse or demonstrating ethical leadership with their subordinates to the extent they disidentify with their abusive managers. Across 2 experiments (n = 288 and 462 working adults, respectively) and a field study (n = 500 employees and their supervisors), we show that relations between manager abuse and supervisors’ abusive and ethical behaviors were carried by supervisors’ disidentification, and that the direct and indirect effects of manager abuse were stronger for supervisors with comparatively higher moral identity levels. We discuss our findings’ implications and avenues for future research.