Published on: December 24, 2025 at 5:28 am
By Nick Keppler
Economics alone cannot explain the behaviors of entrepreneurs, according to Academy of Management Scholar Marc Gruber of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
“We always assume that they all want to create a high-growth venture, earn a lot of money that way, generate a financial income of a significant size, achieve a lucrative exit, etcetera,” Gruber said. “And as lecturers, we usually apply this one-size-fits-all perspective in our teaching.”
But when he began studying the company founders in the late 2000s, he discovered many of them have more complex and broad-minded motivations. Applying insights from social identity theory, a powerful theoretical lens that explores behaviors through group affiliations, Gruber could classify entrepreneurs by their self-interpreted role in society. He identified three main types: Darwinians, communitarians, and missionaries.
“The Darwinians look for financial return,” Gruber said. “The communitarians look to support and be supported by the community, and the missionaries want to pursue a more political, social agenda and help society at large.”
Gruber and his co-author, Emmanuelle Fauchart, described this framework in a study for which they interviewed 49 company founders in the sporting-goods sector. That research also found some entrepreneurs may have traits of more than one category, which can give rise to critical tensions when choosing which action to pursue in startup creation.
Darwinian founders value efficiency and business competency above all else. They have little loyalty to their field or vertical, and many say they could have started a business in any sector. Some thought that competition caused them to become more vigilant and agile but ultimately, they seek to beat the competition in their field.
Communitarians view themselves as part of a group that values their product or service. In the study, makers of consumer products such as innovative bicycles and snowboards spoke of their own love for their sport and the thrill of competitive events where they hawked their brand to other enthusiasts. As they want to see their communities grow, they also do not mind if other entrepreneurs copy their product, as long as they show the same authentic attitude towards their activity.
Missionaries see their companies as vehicles to change society and implement a larger agenda that they champion. For sports equipment makers, this frequently means dedication to sustainable, environmentally friendly, and/or non-exploitative supply chains. Missionaries do not just want to sustain their own clean conscience; they want to show the world that a better, more sustainable way of doing business is possible.
Overall, these distinct identities can trickle down and define a corporate culture, Gruber said. Like anyone else, entrepreneurs seek self-realization.
“Each one of us—you, me, everyone—has an identity or multiple identities, depending on the setting you are in, and you feel good about yourself once you can enact who you are in your job,” Gruber said.
This may be even more so within a class of people whose career affords them a high degree of creative and executive power.
“In entrepreneurship, you have lots of degrees of freedom of what you do, with whom you work, what your actions and behaviors are, so actually an identity lens is quite a powerful way to understand entrepreneurial activity,” Gruber said.
