The added value of implicit motives for management research Development and first validation of a Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) for the measurement of implicit motives

Abstract

Many Management (sub-)disciplines, from Organizational Behavior and Marketing to Accounting and Strategy, are interested in antecedents and consequences of individual attitudes and traits. A key aspect of personality profiles are explicit and implicit motives. Yet, Management scholars mainly focus on explicit motives, with limited attention to implicit motives. We argue that this state of affairs probably came into being because current Management researchers mainly rely on implicit motive measures that are either difficult to apply or to develop, hampering researchers from applying implicit motive measures. To overcome the downsides of available instruments, we develop a Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) as an efficient, reliable and valid measure of implicit motives, particularly the needs for achievement, affiliation and power. To explore our BIAT’s predictive validity, we apply this measure to a specific research domain within Management: Entrepreneurship. We examine implicit motives’ association with entrepreneurial self-efficacy, business founding, and financial profitability. Our results show that the introduction of implicit motives can unlock stranded discussions in this research domain. Overall, we argue that implicit motives can help to push the boundaries of the study of deep-level attributes in a wide range of organizational and managerial settings.

Explicit and Implicit Basic Human Motives, and Public Service Motivation

“…Despite these modifications, the BIAT retains the favorable psychometric properties of the original IAT (Sriram and Greenwald, 2009;Bar-Anan and Nosek, 2014;Nosek et al, 2014). Recently, and important for our research, Hermans et al (2017) and Slabbinck et al (2018) optimized the BIAT for the assessment of implicit motives.…”

Micro-foundations of small business internationalization: introduction to the Special Section

“…This lack of attention to the individual level does not only contradict general small business and entrepreneurship literature (Shepherd, 2011), but also ignores SME internationalization research (Oviatt and McDougall, 2005) where it is argued that the manager / owner is in the centre of the entrepreneurial decision-making process (Bruneel and De Cock, 2016;Peschken et al, 2016). Given that motivational dispositions and specifically deep-rooted implicit needs energize individuals and predict stable, long-term behaviour (Schultheiss and Brunstein, 2010;Slabbinck et al, 2018) In sum, even though the body of knowledge on the pre-internationalization phase thus shows that individual aspects such as risk perception (e.g., Acedo and Jones, 2007;Shrader et al, 2000), higher education levels (e.g., Amorós et al, 2016) or international experience (Child and Hsieh, 2014) impact the decision to internationalize and its timing, the specificities on the impact of such individual aspects in specific sub-domains are under-researched (e.g., Bruneel and De Cock, 2016) and the number of studies on deeper-level psychological and behavioural aspects is still surprisingly low (Acedo and Florin, 2006;Geh, 2010;Peschken et al, 2016).…”

The paradox of public bureaucracies:Discriminatory bureaucrats in non-discriminatory bureaucracies

“…Third, future research could include implicit methods (cf. Slabbinck et al 2018) to systematically and (quasi-)experimentally scrutinize what exactly causes asymmetric discrimination in SRB behavior to further explore the behavioral paradox of modern public sector bureaucracies. Notes: Items are either reported with geometric means and standard deviations (M ± SD) or proportions (%) and frequencies (n).…”