Is empathy a uniformly good thing for entrepreneurs? Contrasting the hitherto predominantly positive view advocated by the extant entrepreneurship literature, we develop a novel model of entrepreneurial empathy's mechanisms and suggest a ‘too-much-of-a-good-thing’ perspective. We empirically confirm this model using a dataset of 4425 real entrepreneurs, where we find that empathy influences entrepreneurial new product development as an essential entrepreneurial activity in an inverted U-shaped pattern. We further show that empathy's negative effects are particularly detrimental for very anxious entrepreneurs. These findings provide strong evidence for considering entrepreneurial empathy an important but highly ambiguous success factor.

同理心对于企业家来说都是一件好事吗？与现有创业文献所倡导的迄今为止占主导地位的积极观点相比，我们开发了一种新颖的创业同理心机制模型，并提出了“好事太多”的观点。我们使用 4425 名真实企业家的数据集实证验证了这个模型，我们发现同理心以倒 U 形模式影响创业新产品开发，作为一项重要的创业活动。我们进一步表明，同理心的负面影响对于非常焦虑的企业家来说尤其有害。这些发现为将创业同理心视为重要但高度模糊的成功因素提供了强有力的证据。