The role of affect in international opportunity recognition and the formation of international opportunity beliefs

When analyzing IOR, the literature establishes two perspectives on how entrepreneurs recognize IOs: active search and passive discovery. In active IOR, entrepreneurs rationally and proactively search for and gather information to recognize IOs (Chetty et al. 2018; Tuomisalo 2019). The search initiative derives from the international entrepreneur’s own decision (Zaefarian et al. 2016). Typical actions for this type of IOR are conducting export market research (Ciravegna et al. 2014b) or seeking to address international customers’ unmet needs or unresolved problems (Harms et al. 2009; Tuomisalo 2019). Typically, entrepreneurs who carry out an active search for IOR are looking for a missing piece of information, and therefore are usually clear about the data s/he is searching for (Chandra et al. 2009).

Conversely, in passive IOR, IOs are recognized through serendipitous encounters, also called fortuitous or accidental discoveries (Kiss et al. 2020; Hilmersson et al. 2021). Although these IOs are identified without any planned search, they are not pure luck (Chandra et al. 2009; Galan and Torsein 2021); entrepreneurial alertness, intuition, and acumen act as critical enablers (Chandra et al. 2009; Kraus et al. 2017). Examples of this type of discovery include identifying IOs by reading newspapers, unexpected conversations, or during holidays (Ciravegna et al. 2014a; Zaefarian et al. 2016). Thus, in passive IOR, there are no specific market problems to solve, and there is no purposeful information seeking; hence intentions to find an IO are low (Chetty et al. 2018).

At this point, although we do not deny the possibility that active and passive IOR can occur simultaneously, we align with previous theoretical and empirical investigations (cf. Tabares et al. 2021) that argue there is a predisposition towards one or the other. Such predisposition is exhibited through a greater or lesser degree of activeness (or passiveness) for the identification of an IO (Ciravegna et al. 2014b). Previous evidence also suggests that some individual factors lead to this predisposition (cf. Hilmersson and Papaioannou 2015; Kraus et al. 2017), and that identifying an IO through one mechanism or the other leads to differences in exploitation and firm performance (cf. De Clercq et al. 2012; Ciravegna et al. 2014b). Therefore, what is suggested in this study is that entrepreneurs will tend to identify IOs in one way or another based on affective aspects and, depending on the IOR mechanism, they will evaluate the IOs differently.

Affect can be defined over different time frames. Affect experienced over time is referred to as dispositional (trait) affect, while affect experienced in a specific moment is referred to as state (event-generated) affect (Watson and Clark 1984). While previous literature on entrepreneurship has identified evidence that, in general, both dispositional and state affect produce similar effects (Baron 2008; Baron et al. 2011), scholars suggest that because each stage of the entrepreneurial process spreads over extended periods of time, dispositional affect may be more directly relevant for entrepreneurship literature (Baron et al. 2011; Bernoster et al. 2020). Indeed, recent studies have proposed that dispositional affect is a key component in understanding the entrepreneurial mindset, in the sense that it is often dispositional affect that can drive it (Kuratko et al. 2020; Pidduck et al. 2021). In this study, we adopt a personological orientation (rather than motivational orientation), that is, we focus on dispositional affect (Cacciotti and Hayton 2015; Bernoster et al. 2020), which is defined as an individual’s stable and underlying propensity to experience particular positive and negative emotions and feelings across many situations (Watson and Clark 1984). Particularly, we focus on examining courage and hope as positive affective dispositions and anticipated regret and fear of failure as negative affective dispositions, mainly based on two reasons. First, these affective dispositions have been suggested as commonly experienced by entrepreneurs (Cacciotti and Hayton 2015; Ebert et al. 2019; Benevolo et al. 2021). Second, they have been proposed as having relatively high effects on the IE context (Alon et al. 2013; Dong and Muzychenko 2018; Riquelme and Alqallaf 2020). Table 1 summarizes what has been previously studied on each of these four stable affective dispositions and includes also two relevant studies on the role of affect in general in IE. It is worth noting that the literature review reflected in Table 1 allows us to corroborate that there is a research gap in that the role of positive and negative stable affective dispositions may be relevant to understanding why some international entrepreneurs actively identify IOs while others do so passively.

Afterward recognizing an IO, the IE process continues with various actions to evaluate it in entrepreneurs’ minds (Harms et al. 2009; Chandra 2017; Bolzani and Boari 2018). We know that for the evaluation, entrepreneurs adopt a future-oriented posture in which they think about what will happen if they exploit the IO they are evaluating (Ivanova et al. 2018; Bolzani et al. 2021). This evaluation mainly considers entrepreneurs’ feasibility and desirability beliefs judging if those identified IOs constitute an attractive action path (Williams and Wood 2015; Bolzani et al. 2021). Feasibility is referred as the belief that exploiting an IO is viable with the resources that the international entrepreneur dispossess (Nowiński and Rialp 2016). Hence, it constitutes a mental “comparison” between the resources (e.g., means, capabilities, skills, and information) that an international entrepreneur possesses with the required resources he/she requires to exploit the IO (Bolzani and Boari 2018). The closer this comparison is, the more viable the IO will be perceived (Ivanova et al. 2018). On the other hand, desirability could be understood as the belief that successfully exploiting an IO would fulfill the international entrepreneur’s goals, desires, and needs (Nowiński and Rialp 2016). This belief is based on the international entrepreneur’s judgment about the objective or reward of exploiting an IO (Bolzani et al. 2021).

We rely on broaden-and-build (Fredrickson 2004) and affect-as-information (Clore et al. 2001a) theories to address how positive and negative affect influence IOR perspectives. The broaden-and-build theory, argues that positive affect helps activate and broaden the scope of attention and the repertoire of possible actions, while negative affect reduces the scope of attention (Fredrickson 2004). This theory also claims that positive (negative) affect fosters (hinders) more exploratory thoughts and engenders (prevents) creative fluency and flexibility (Fredrickson and Branigan 2005). This fluency and flexibility allow people to easily perceive connections between ideas and link them (Isen 2008). With reference exclusively to positive affect, this theory postulates that it helps individuals maintain a sense of control over challenges, which encourages people to focus on new opportunities and possibilities rather than limitations (Fredrickson 2001; Lam et al. 2014).

The affect-as-information theory establishes that individuals behave based on the information they receive when implicitly asking themselves how they feel (Clore et al. 2001a). Positive affect serves as a signal that individuals are on the right track (that things are going well) (Clore et al. 2001b). As a result, positive affect pushes people towards proactive behaviors as it fosters a vision of the future (Foo et al. 2009), but at the same time, it indicates to the individuals that such proactivity may be moderated as they may feel that things are generally going well (Schwarz and Clore 1996). Meanwhile, negative affect serves as feedback that something is wrong and requires more effort in the form of time and personal attention (Clore et al. 2001b). Thus, negative affect signals the need for more focused and deliberate information processing to overcome that negativity (Schwarz and Clore 1983; Emich and Lu 2021).

To explain how each IOR perspective may lead to differently form international opportunity desirability and feasibility beliefs to judge the opportunities recognized in the foreign market, we draw on the mental model theory (Johnson-Laird 1983). This theory has been widely utilized to explain how people form beliefs and make assessments. Its basic premise is that as individuals process information, they form mental models to predict and evaluate future situations (Johnson-Laird 1983; Gentner and Stevens 2014). These mental models are formed as individuals interpret and internalize new information (Johnson-Laird 1983) and are molded depending on “the degree to which situation characteristics are related to the goals, motives, and needs of the perceiver” (Wood et al. 2014, p. 255).

To carry out the theorization of our study and contribute to the IE field’s theory development, we propose a combined approach between the two affective theories and the cognitive theory presented in the previous sections.

Although broaden-and-build and affect-as-information theories overlap a great deal, their integration through their mutual exclusivities has been found relevant to explaining applied psychology aspects in business and management settings (e.g., Lam et al. 2014; Emich and Lu 2021). These theories suggest that positive affect may lead individuals to exhibit greater action tendency (proactive behaviors) and increased use of higher-level processing. However, only the broaden-and-build theory concurrently argues that positive affect broadens the scope of attention (alertness, awareness and intuition) and the repertoire of possible actions, which fosters the fluency and flexibility necessary to see beyond that of proactive behavior alone. Alternatively, the affect-as-information theory suggests that even if both positive and negative affect drives the individual toward proactive attitudes, positive affect can also lead to moderate such proactive effort. This theory also postulates that negative affect signals to individuals that only proactive behavior can lead them to cope with the negativity they feel.

Based on these premises, it can be suggested that, in our context, positive affect could encourage IOR processes. We theorize that as positive affect signals individuals that things are going well and encourage them to focus on new opportunities and possibilities, may both facilitate entrepreneurs to engage in proactive and deliberate behaviors and increase the scope of attention to see what was hitherto not suspected to exist at all. The relationship between negative affect and the IOR approaches may be explained by two underlying processes. On the one hand, we suggest that negative affect would serve as a warning sign that current progress is below the expectations and may lead entrepreneurs to increase their effort level in IOR activities. That is, negative affect increases the intensity to act. On the other hand, we argue that negative affect, by reducing the scope of attention and hindering the most exploratory thoughts, creative fluency, and flexibility inhibits the entrepreneurs’ alertness, intuition, and acumen, necessary for IOR.

Considering that international entrepreneurial theoretical frameworks that ignore the significant connection between affect and cognition will inevitably be poorly specified (Muzychenko and Liesch 2015; Kuratko et al. 2020), we propose that the mental model theory can complement the above affective theories to explain the general framework of this study focused on pre-international-entrepreneurial phases, that is, IOR and IOE. The IE literature reveals that both phases are interrelated processes that are based on different mechanisms (Di Gregorio et al. 2021). We conceptualize these processes within a cognitive-affective framework, in which IOs are first actively or passively recognized guided by positive or negative stable affective dispositions. After recognizing a new IO, entrepreneurs evaluate the feasibility and desirability of exploiting the identified IO through cognitive mechanisms (Wood et al. 2014). Indeed, mental model theory suggests that, from their cognitive models, entrepreneurs form mental images of the IO that depend on the relationship between the recognized IO and the entrepreneur’s goals, desires, and willingness of having pursue the IO (Williams and Wood 2015; Haaja 2020; Bolzani et al. 2021). As self-centered mental images, beliefs of IO feasibility and desirability and their formation will then vary depending on the entrepreneurs’ intention and willingness related to the search of the IO. An active search demonstrates a willingness to pursue an IO, and literature suggests that more willingness leads to more desirability and feasibility to exploit an IO (Wood et al. 2014). As such, since international entrepreneurs who passively identified an IO had neither the willingness nor the intention to recognize it, their mental images about the desirability and feasibility are likely to be more conservative and opaque than those who identified the IO through an active search.

Next, we discuss how courage and hope as positive affective dispositions, and anticipated regret and fear of failure as negative affective dispositions can predict active and passive IOR.

Although there is not a commonly agreed definition for courage in psychology, in this study we follow the conceptualization that courage has received in entrepreneurship. That is, courage is seen as a trait affect that promotes persistence and the ability to act despite fear, even when faced with opposition (Bockorny and Youssef-Morgan 2019; Ebert et al. 2019). Empirical evidence that relates courage to sensation‐seeking (Muris 2009) and predisposition to take risks (Howard and Alipour 2014) suggest that courageous individuals seem to have a wide sort of characteristics that favor international entrepreneurial behavior, as international entrepreneurs must have the courage to face the challenges that the international environment brings (Bartlett and Ghoshal 2000; Haaja 2020). In general, courageous international entrepreneurs are likely to be more confident, and therefore they are open to embrace uncertainty and try new things (Haaja 2020). Indeed, Ebert et al. (2019) demonstrate that there is a greater entrepreneurial activity in regions where people have high levels of courage. Thus, we argue that courage may favor both active and passive IOR. On the one hand, courage has been addressed as an important push for proactive involvement in entrepreneurial gestation activities as courageous entrepreneurs usually have a “can do” and “will do” attitude (Bockorny and Youssef-Morgan 2019). Therefore, courage may push international entrepreneurs to pursue IOs intentionally. On the other hand, courage acts as an enhancer to conquer unknown territory (Koellinger 2008), as it provides individuals a broader scope of attention and repertoires of thought (Fredrickson and Branigan 2005) and thus increases international entrepreneurial alertness and intuition. This will make them not only retrieve stored information but be more open to perceiving new information in passive search situations. According to this discussion, we hypothesize that:

Hope, as a dispositional affect, is the constant feeling that events will turn out for the best and that alternative routes can be found to achieve these goals (Snyder et al. 1991, 2002). Hopeful individuals have a higher probability of participating in the entrepreneurial process, starting a new venture, and building a successful business (Li 2011; Fatma et al. 2021). Consistent with the broaden-and-build theory, the literature postulates that hope acts as a factor that increases entrepreneurs’ perceptiveness of opportunities, enhances their capacity to engender ideas, and leads them to engage in risky decisions and activities (Gerleve and Flatten 2019; Fatma et al. 2021). Besides, recent evidence suggests that positive affective dispositions, such as hope, can be highly effective in favoring the IE process (Basly and Saunier 2020) and in seeing IOR as a desirable activity (Muzychenko and Liesch 2015). Thus, we expect a positive relationship between hope and both active and passive IOR. On the one hand, hope as a factor that increases entrepreneurs’ ambitions and that improves their efficacy to develop the market (Gerleve and Flatten 2019), may push them to get actively involved in strategic planning activities (Snyder et al. 1991) and to increase their planning repertoire to pursue an IO intentionally. On the other hand, as hope increases entrepreneurs’ scope of attention, it makes them particularly sensitive to perceive opportunities through a creative mindset (Rego et al. 2012). Thus, hope may strengthen international entrepreneurs’ alertness and improve their perception of many events occurring in the international environment. Formally stated:

Building on the broaden-and-build theory, it is expectable that courage and hope may have a greater relationship with passive IOR than active IOR. Through courage and hope, international entrepreneurs may arrive at a higher state of alertness where they increase their creative fluidity, flexibility, and perception by thinking outside the box (Fredrickson and Branigan 2005; Fatma et al. 2021). Therefore, international entrepreneurs broaden their mental horizons and create a greater state of awareness that allows them to notice that which has hitherto not been suspected of existing at all (Hilmersson et al. 2021). Courage and hope would then induce international entrepreneurs to stay aware of new incoming information while not searching for an IO and to identify IOs through a special sensitivity; for example, by spontaneously connecting the new information they receive with previously stored information (Zaefarian et al. 2016; Tabares et al. 2021).

The affect-as-information theory reinforces our expectation that courage and hope may have a stronger relationship with passive IOR. As a compelling information signal that things are going well, positive affect may moderate international entrepreneurs’ effort and proactive behavior toward tasks (Foo et al. 2009). Although the broaden-and-build effect may facilitate both active and passive IOR, the information provided by positive affect may moderate their effort to actively identify IOs. This does not mean that entrepreneurs decrease focused attention or stop actively pursuing an IO, but it does mean that they moderate their effort as it may indicate to them that there is no urgency to engage in change behaviors at the present time (Lam et al. 2014). Therefore, we argue that hopeful and courageous international entrepreneurs will be more prone to identify IOs serendipitously rather than purposefully since they are driven by a high state of perceptiveness that will allow them to identify IOs beyond an organized and methodical process. Formally stated:

Anticipated regret is defined here as the constant experience of the regret that individuals experience as a result of comparing the anticipated outcome of their decision not to act with the outcome they would have experienced had they acted (Loewenstein and Lerner 2003; Neneh 2019). Previous literature argues that anticipated regret acts as an affective push that forces individuals to engage in entrepreneurial gestation activities (Hatak and Snellman 2017; Neneh 2019). Anticipated regret will make international entrepreneurs regret that they did not identify an IO earlier (Glavas et al. 2017) and may push them to pursue an opportunity in the international market. However, research has also shown that international entrepreneurs with negative affect will perceive an IO as riskier and thus see the international market with more uncertainty (Riquelme and Alqallaf 2020). As such, research on anticipated regret argues that individuals prefer choices that minimize their potential negative consequences (Tochkov 2009). In this vein, it seems plausible that anticipated regret drives international entrepreneurs to put more effort into seeking and gathering information to recognize IOs (Foo et al. 2009). They will be more persuaded to identify IOs through a rational, systematic process to minimize the potential adverse outcomes and risks of the international market. In contrast, anticipated regret will make international entrepreneurs narrow their passive search and alertness since it will lead to low levels of attention and limit information exploration in work and non-work contexts (Fredrickson 2004; Savolainen 2014). Thus, entrepreneurs will leave out a wide range of events occurring in the international environment. Formally stated:

Fear of failure is the individual’s stable disposition to experience shame or humiliation as a consequence of failure (Atkinson 1966; Cacciotti and Hayton 2015). This negative affect could both inhibit and motivate entrepreneurial behavior and decision-making (Cacciotti et al. 2016). Experiencing fear of failure leads international entrepreneurs to view circumstances with more uncertainty (Alon et al. 2013), and thus it narrows their scope of attention (Fredrickson and Branigan 2005; Savolainen 2014). As international markets could be seen as unfamiliar business environments filled with risks and uncertainty, fear of failure plays an even more critical role than in “domestic” entrepreneurship (Dong and Muzychenko 2018). Indeed, Alon et al. (2013) argued that international entrepreneurs’ fear of failure declines their proneness to internationalize. Besides, affect-as-information theory establishes that negative affect acts as a risk enhancer and generates pessimistic behaviors, but it may also increase individuals’ effort to mitigate risk perception (Foo et al. 2009). In our context, this could mean that fear of failure pushes international entrepreneurs to search for information exhaustively and from trusted sources to identify IOs. Indeed, Cacciotti et al. (2016) postulate that fear of failure is likely to lead entrepreneurs to focus on specific information, possibly waiting to visualize a bigger picture of the opportunity. Following this line of reasoning, we postulate that fear of failure would stimulate the purposeful search and inhibit the serendipitous discovery of IOs. Formally stated:

We theorize that although both active and passive IOR may lead to forming international opportunity desirability and feasibility beliefs, active IOR leads to higher opportunity feasibility and desirability beliefs than passive IOR. In active IOR, the search initiative comes from the entrepreneurs themselves pushed either by positive or negative affect, and frequently, they are clear about what they are looking to find (Tuomisalo 2019). Indeed, entrepreneurs search for a specific missing piece of information to identify a sought-after IO rather than looking for an entirely new IO (Kontinen and Ojala 2011). This involves that the entrepreneur’s intentions and willingness to identify an IO are high (Zaefarian et al. 2016), making the search process somehow predictable and therefore that the discovered IO is perceived as proximate to the entrepreneur’s goals, desires, resources, and needs (Bolzani and Boari 2018). By perceiving the IO as proximate, entrepreneurs should form strong desirability and feasibility beliefs of exploiting it. Similarly, the literature indicates that entrepreneurs who have actively recognized an IO show a stronger and clearer commitment to exploit the IO (Ciravegna et al. 2014b). The logic is that IOs discovered through an active, systematic way reduce the potential adverse effects and cognitive biases that emerge in the IOR process (Chandra et al. 2009) since international entrepreneurs rely on trusted information sources and, therefore, these IOs are seen as appropriate and safer to exploit (Miocevic and Morgan 2018; Tabares et al. 2021). Following this line of reasoning, it is proposed that IOs identified actively will fit entrepreneurs’ desires, goals and resources and thus will lead them to visualize the exploitation of the IO as attractive, easy to realize, and controllable (Williams and Wood 2015; Bolzani et al. 2021).

In passive IOR, international entrepreneurs unwillingly recognize an IO guided through their intuition and/or serendipity by unintentionally broadening their search scope and thinking outside the box (Zaefarian et al. 2016). This leads entrepreneurs to identify unexpected IOs, which may come from unfamiliar knowledge areas (Hilmersson et al. 2021). Given their accidental appearance, it can be argued that entrepreneurs will be faced with an entirely new IO (Kontinen and Ojala 2011), which indeed would imply a reinvention of entrepreneurs’ goals, desires, and/or resources to exploit it. As such, passively identified IOs may be seen as less proximate, and therefore be perceived as uncertain, risky, and less safe to exploit, promoting seeing an IO with less confidence and safety than IOs recognized actively (Chandra et al. 2009). This should translate into more conservative and faint mental images about exploiting the IO’s desirability and feasibility. Thus, we argue that it seems plausible that IOs identified actively fit more with the entrepreneurs’ goals, desires, and resources so that they can see those IOs with greater desirability and feasibility. Formally stated:

Figure 1 shows the hypothesized model tested in this study.

This research makes at least two main theoretical contributions. First, we contribute to the emerging literature on the individual-level factors explaining why international entrepreneurs are driven to recognize IOs by active or passive search. Prior studies have highlighted cognitive and experience-based factors to explain why differences in IOR may exist (e.g., Hilmersson and Papaioannou 2015; Kraus et al. 2017). We go one step further by analyzing how positive and negative affect influence these processes, and therefore we extend the knowledge in this stream by adding new factors to the debate on how individual-level aspects influence IOR. We specifically offer one of the first empirical papers investigating the role of positive and negative stable affective dispositions in IE, and the first to examine their role on IOR approaches (see Table 1).

As a theoretical basis for our study, we build a coherent fit between broaden-and-build and affect-as-information theories, the two most promising theoretical approaches to understanding how affect impacts on the entrepreneurship process. In doing so, we answer recent calls for theoretical and empirical research on the role of positive and negative stable affective dispositions in IOR to provide valuable insights into the IE literature (e.g., Glavas et al. 2017; Dillon et al. 2020). Our study thus extends prior conceptual and case study-based studies that supposed that IOR might be influenced by dispositional affect, by directly linking positive and negative stable affective dispositions to IOR. As a relevant addition, we investigate the role of four stable affective dispositions (i.e., courage, hope, fear of failure, and anticipated regret) and show that they may affect each IOR perspective differently. By including them into the debate on the individual-level factors that influence IOR, we consider the emotional aspect of the entrepreneurial mindset, which is a crucial element although little studied yet. Often it is the affect what drives the entrepreneurial mindset (Kuratko et al. 2020; Pidduck et al. 2021), and thus understating how it influences international entrepreneurial behavior is of great relevance. Thus, this empirical investigation represents a first starting point towards a better understanding of how positive and negative affect act as an individual-level determinant of the IOR process.

Second, we contribute to the flourishing literature on how IO feasibility and desirability beliefs are formed for evaluating IOs. Previous studies in this field have mainly examined the effect of individual-level factors (e.g., social network ties, entrepreneurs’ international business skills, and entrepreneurial experience) or perceived environmental conditions (e.g., governmental financial and regulatory support) (e.g., Nowiński and Rialp 2016; Bolzani and Boari 2018; Bolzani et al. 2021). However, prior research has failed to evidence how the way the IO was recognized determines the formation of opportunity desirability and feasibility beliefs. It is important to understand how opportunity beliefs are formed since they have been recognized as a relevant driver for international entrepreneurial action (Bolzani et al. 2021). Using the mental model theory, we demonstrated that opportunity beliefs are differently formed and shaped depending on how the IO was identified. While we cannot directly study the mental models of international entrepreneurs, our findings are indicative of the basic premises of the mental model theory. Thus, our results suggest that entrepreneurs shape their opportunity beliefs depending on how the IO characteristics are related to the perceiver’s goals, desires, and needs. More specifically, our findings show that international entrepreneurs who actively recognized an IO should be more likely to evaluate the IO as more feasible and desirable to exploit than international entrepreneurs who passively identified an IO. Our results, therefore, align with more general findings that suggest that active IOR leads to a faster and more intensive internationalization (Ciravegna et al. 2014b). As such, this investigation provides a first insight on the relevance of the way of identifying an opportunity in the international market, in understanding the formation of beliefs about the feasibility and desirability of exploiting the opportunity and thus their effect in the IOE process. This is particularly relevant since IE is a process of various stages, and IOR and IOE are two intertwined and interdependent processes, which, however, have been scarcely studied as a whole (Tabares et al. 2021; Di Gregorio et al. 2021). Thus, we also enrich the link between IOR and IOE as two interrelated and interdependent processes.

The results offer practical implications for IE practice and education. First, it is relevant for international entrepreneurs to be aware that their cognitive processes and behavior could be influenced by subjective processes such as affect. This might contrast with the presumptions of international entrepreneurs that the recognition of IOs depends only upon objective information. Thus, by recognizing the subjectivity of IOR, international entrepreneurs should consider how positive and negative dispositional affect will influence their IO search behavior. For example, they should be aware that being hopeful can predispose them to expand their search spectrum and identify IOs in both an active and passive manner. Likewise, being courageous will favor alertness to discover opportunities in the international market. At a firm level, these results can be also beneficial for companies operating internationally which face a wide variety of market challenges, to be aware that, for example, entrepreneurial individuals with hopeful future expectations are prone to be “versatile” in identifying IOs since involving those in the firm’s activity can increase the possibilities of recognizing new IOs. In addition, to take advantage of entrepreneurs who are likely to actively identify international opportunities derived from their dispositional affect, companies interested in expanding to the international market could add personality tests in their recruitment processes as additional criteria for selecting personnel for the company.

On the contrary, our results also warn international entrepreneurs that if they experience negative affect, their exploration of information will be limited, and therefore their alertness will be inhibited. However, an exhaustive search for information could mitigate the doubts generated by the negative affect, i.e., this type of affect would lead entrepreneurs to activate an active search for identifying IOs. Thus, entrepreneurs who feel anticipated regret should know that this can encourage them to carry out strategic planning activities to identify an opportunity in the market, and therefore they should let themselves be carried away by that stable affective disposition.

Second, it is also crucial for international entrepreneurs to recognize that opportunity desirability and feasibility beliefs are distinctively formed and shaped depending on if they discover an IO actively or passively, i.e., those beliefs are open to the influence of their information search behavior. In this regard, international entrepreneurs should be aware that discovering IOs through serendipity may decrease their perceived feasibility of its exploitation. Furthermore, they also should know that their opportunity desirability belief appears not to be influenced by their accidental encounters of IOs. On the contrary, international entrepreneurs must know that identifying IOs through active search highly informs their opportunity desirability and feasibility beliefs because the mind will see this type of IOs as very close to fulfilling the entrepreneur’s goals, desires, and needs. This means that international entrepreneurs should be aware that actively recognized IOs will be seen as more viable and attractive, and possibly this will translate into a higher rate of exploitation of these IOs. At a certain point, the mind of the international entrepreneur will automatically assess a passively recognized IO as less viable and desirable. Therefore, we recommend that international entrepreneurs carry out a more in-depth evaluation process of passively identified IOs to complement the mental evaluation that may be biased.

Our results also have implications for IE education. Generally, educational programs focus on developing skills in objective aspects (e.g., internationalization strategies, entry mode, market selection), but there is a lack of teaching on how psychological aspects (e.g., affect, information processing, cognitive processes) can influence the IE process. In this vein, our results show that it would be relevant for future international entrepreneurs to receive instruction about strategies to recognize and regulate their affect and educate them on how their international entrepreneurial search behavior could influence the formation and judgment of IO beliefs.

This study has some limitations that highlight relevant avenues for future research. First, our sample was based in southern Spain, and while it is an interesting context for testing our conceptual model, our results may not be generalizable to other contexts. Therefore, it will be necessary to examine if our results are valid in other countries or even cultural contexts since our unit of analysis is the individuals, and their behavior based on their affect and cognitions could also be influenced by the cultural context where they are embedded (GEM 2020). Second, as our study is based on cross-sectional data, it is not possible to assume any definite conclusions regarding causality. Therefore, future research using longitudinal data would enhance understanding the interrelationships examined in this study.

Third, even if we applied priori and posteriori approaches to control CMB, we acknowledge that maybe using a single informant to collect the data for independent and dependent variables is not ideal. Understanding that our research is focused on studying the entrepreneur’s mind, it is difficult not to use the formula of a single respondent for all variables. However, future studies could link individual variables (of the entrepreneur’s mind) with firm variables (e.g., performance) to study how the international entrepreneur’s mind processes influence the firm. In this way, two or more data sources could be intermixed. Fourth, even if we used five control variables to account for possible differences based on sociodemographic and experience-based factors, the inclusion of variables of a different nature could have reinforced our results. In such a way, future investigations should use, for example, personality dimensions (such as BIG 5) of the respondents as control variables to examine which personality traits exhibit the affective factors.

Fifth, even if we address positive and negative affect, we focus on two positive (hope and courage) and two negative (fear of failure and anticipated regret) stable affective dispositions. Therefore, future studies must explore the effects of other positive and negative stable affective dispositions in active and passive IOR processes and further advance the relationship between affect and cognition in the international entrepreneurial context. Likewise, although the previous literature assumes similar effects, future research should also study the impact of state affect on IOR processes or even carry out studies where the effect of the two types of affect (i.e., dispositional and state) on IOR approaches are compared.

Drawing on broaden-and-build, affect-as-information, and mental model theories, we conducted an empirical study to advance the incipient body of IE literature by developing a model that examines the effect of positive and negative dispositional affect on active and passive IOR and how both processes impact the formation of IO beliefs. The model was tested using a sample of 172 Spanish international entrepreneurs. The results suggest that, in general, positive affect encourages both active and passive search to recognize IOs, while negative affect inhibits passive search and promotes active search. This reflects that the relationship between negative affect and IOR is not that simple. Additionally, our results elucidate that active IOR better informs opportunity desirability and feasibility beliefs than passive IOR, which only predicts feasibility. Thus, we also enrich the link between IOR and IOE as two interrelated and interdependent processes. These insights might shed light and open the way on the relevance of empirically studying IE as a process. Our suggestion is to converge as a theoretical foundation the broaden-and-build, affect-as-information, and mental model theories to understand better how entrepreneurs seek and make sense of new IOs and when this is most likely to occur. This convergence might inspire future studies that delve into the affective and cognitive determinants of international opportunities’ identification and evaluation to investigate further how international entrepreneurs’ minds work.