The Dark Side of Entrepreneurs’ Creativity: Investigating How and When Entrepreneurs’ Creativity Increases the Favorability of Potential Opportunities That Harm Nature
基于道德脱离理论，研究发现创造性思维使企业家更容易为破坏环境的行为找理由，从而更看好那些损害自然的商业机会。
Entrepreneurs’ creativity is the starting point of opportunity identification, exploitation, and innovation, so it is generally lauded by journalists, citizen observers, practitioners, and scholars. However, they may overstate the benefits of creative entrepreneurs while neglecting their potential costs. Building on moral disengagement theory, we theorize that a creative mindset enables entrepreneurs to generate reasons to justify their potentially environment-destroying behaviors (i.e., nature disengagement), which in turn increases their favorability of potential opportunities that harm nature. We first developed and validated a scale for measuring nature disengagement and then conducted two randomized between-subject experiments with active entrepreneurs. The empirical results largely supported our theoretical model of the dark side of creativity in the entrepreneurship context.