Stephen Zhang, Ph.D.
Terry L. Maness Chair of Entrepreneurship | Associate Professor Baylor University
- Waco TX
Research investigates how entrepreneurs and top executives make strategic decisions under uncertainty.
Media
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Top 2% Scientists Worldwide
2024, 2025
Stanford University
Researcher of the Year
2021
University of Adelaide
Education
Nanyang Technological University
B.Eng.
Electrical and Electronic Engineering
2004
National University of Singapore
Ph.D.
2010
Affiliations
- Academy of Management (AOM)
- Australasian Consortium for Entrepreneurship Research Excellence (ACERE)
- Strategic Management Society (SMS)
Media Appearances
How families influence entrepreneurs’ journey
Business Daily online
2026-02-03
A new longitudinal study published this month by Francesco Chirico, Wei Wang, and Stephen Zhang, which is getting a lot of academic attention around the world, looks at how precisely an entrepreneur’s upbringing in various types of families can shape their business startup entry and journey.
Articles
From shutdown to reopening: unpacking the determinants of tourism business reopening in the face of adversity
Current Issues in Tourism2025
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and its associated lockdowns put many tourism businesses on hold. Although these lockdowns have been lifted, not all tourism entrepreneurs reopened their businesses. While prior research has extensively explored the post-pandemic recovery of tourism businesses, there has been relatively limited attention given to the determinants of tourism entrepreneurs to reopen their businesses post-crisis. Drawing on upper echelons theory, this paper explores the role of tourism entrepreneurs’ age in driving the decision to reopen their businesses in the face of adversity. Empirical evidence from a two-wave multi-informant survey involving 134 entrepreneurs in small and medium-sized tourism enterprises in China reveals that older entrepreneurs were more likely to reopen their businesses after the lockdowns were lifted.
Haste makes waste: Nonlinear effects of proactive orientation on innovation speed in new ventures
Technovation2025
Drawing on resource orchestration theory, how proactive orientation impacts the speed of innovation in new ventures was examined along with the moderating effects of entrepreneurs’ business experience and political networking capability. Data from a survey of 574 new ventures indicate an inverted U-shaped relationship between proactive orientation and innovation speed. Political networking capability and business experience enhance the positive effects of proactive orientation on innovation speed, increasing innovation speed-related returns from proactive orientation and diminishing the negative effects of excessive proactive orientation. These findings enrich and advance research on resource orchestration and innovation speed, contributing to a deeper understanding of how new ventures can transform their proactive orientation into faster innovation despite limited resources.
Notes on Lessons from Health Sciences for Responsible Management Research
Management and Organization Review2025
We deeply appreciate the thoughtful commentaries from Tsang (2025), Meyer (2025), Davis (2025), and Friedman (2025) on our paper ‘Responsible Research: Reflections of Two Business Scholars Doing Mental Health Research During COVID-19’. These commentaries have enriched the conversation we sought to initiate through our experiential account of conducting mental health research during the pandemic. The perspectives offered–ranging from philosophical considerations about explanation versus prediction to reflections on the narrative orientation of management knowledge–deserve critical engagement as we collectively contemplate the nature of responsible research in business and management.
CROSSROADS—Organization research as an applied science: Lessons from fields that shape practice and policy
Organization Science2025
Numerous calls over decades have urged scholars to pursue research that is more relevant to problems faced by organizations and their members. Yet the relevance and impact of our field remains limited compared with other applied sciences. Whereas individual aspects of our research practice, such as expectations about methods, theoretical novelty, and motivating a study, are frequently discussed in our field, less attention is paid to the publication system. Our perspective is that to bring about a field-wide change would require us to identify and address the systemic sources of the issue. Accordingly, we compare publication systems across applied sciences, contrasting organization research with those of impactful applied sciences, such as health sciences, engineering, economics, and design science.
Family Political Embeddedness: A Double-Edged Sword for Entrepreneurial Entry in China
Journal of Management2026
Political embeddedness and family embeddedness are two influential yet distinct areas of entrepreneurship research. In this study, we integrate these two streams of research to focus on family political embeddedness and its implications for new venture creation. Drawing on the social embeddedness perspective and utilizing a longitudinal dataset of 17,084 individuals from the China Family Panel Studies (2014–2022), complemented by 32 qualitative interviews, we examine the relationship between family political embeddedness and entrepreneurial entry, revealing a nuanced interplay. Our theory and related findings reveal a general negative relationship between family political embeddedness and entrepreneurial entry. However, we also unveil an indirect pathway through which family political embeddedness can foster entrepreneurial entry through political news consumption.
