Inter-role conflicts of AEs
This study reveals that simultaneously performing the roles of educator, researcher, and entrepreneur demanded inconsistent behaviors and orientations of AEs regarding time management, risk-taking, skill building, and goal setting, which jointly hindered their accommodation of the new role of the entrepreneur in addition to their traditional academic roles.
Time management
Most AEs perceived time-related conflicts as one of the greatest challenges—not only because entrepreneurship involves extra work but also because it requires a different routine compared to that of academic roles. Most interviewees expressed that the schedules of entrepreneurs necessitated extensive attention to time management in the absence of fixed working hours. One interviewee explained,
A6: There are so many things I must make a final decision and approve … if you want to get it all done, you’re going to burn yourself out.
By comparison, the working time of researchers and teachers is more routine:
A5: Although doing research is exploratory and requires much time and energy, it is more focused and persistent…Since the course contents I teach are fixed, I am familiar with them, so I do not have to spend much time preparing the lessons.
Evidently, for academics who are more accustomed to research and teaching routines, the hectic and dynamic schedule of an entrepreneur can pose challenges for time management.
Risk-taking behavior
Compared to university academics, who have permanent positions or are employed for fixed terms, entrepreneurs face certain risks in the rapidly changing market. This point is illustrated by the following responses:
A2: The market is highly unstable, and any mistake may lead to entrepreneurial failure.
A1: The cost of making a wrong decision [as an entrepreneur] is huge, as it is the loss of real money. I must bear all the consequences myself, no matter what. By contrast, decision-making at university is much simpler.
Many interviewees reported encountering uncertainties in their entrepreneurial endeavors, such as unanticipated changes in clients’ needs or the withdrawal of an investor. University academics may find it difficult to adapt to a new risk-taking pattern because they are accustomed to a routine and stable work environment.
Skill building
Another common theme was that academics often lack the skills that are typically essential for entrepreneurship, including marketing and management skills. They may harbor reservations toward marketing tactics prevalent in the business sector, as one interviewee admitted:
A6: I don’t pay much attention to hyping or publicizing…In my opinion, a good product does not need excessive packaging and publicity.
Another interviewee similarly complained about the extra managerial labor in addition to his technical work:
A8: We need to spend much time on solving non-technical problems such as management and operation…That’s why many academics fall into two extremes when they start a business: either they will be abandoned by capital, or they will sacrifice their technical skills.
Here, the final sentence implies that the conflicting skill requirements of academics and entrepreneurs are incompatible to such a degree that one must inevitably choose between the two extremes.
Goal orientation
The three roles of AEs also differ significantly in their goal orientations: While entrepreneurs strive to survive in the market, educators need to be responsible for students and researchers aim to make breakthroughs in scientific fields. These discrete goal orientations may cause AEs to have conflicting experiences in the academic and business fields. Some may even compromise their academic and research ambitions to satisfy the requirements of investors and sustain their business:
A7: My purpose of establishing a company was to gather people together to do something meaningful…But later on, [we were] “kidnaped” by the capital. Investors constantly put forward additional requirements that were not our original pursuits.
As such, scientific breakthroughs with long-term value or scholarly contributions might not translate immediately to meeting the short-term goals of entrepreneurship, which prioritize efficiency and profits (Yin & Shen, 2006).
Inter-sender conflicts from university stakeholders
Inter-sender conflicts arise from incompatible policies, evaluation standards, and conflicting demands from different parties. Our study reveals an intricate relationship between AEs and other university stakeholders in China. The conflicting perspectives of stakeholders coalesced into three overarching themes: graduate students’ developmental (mis)alignment with entrepreneurial activities, non-entrepreneur academics’ legitimacy debates about the role of commercialization in academia, and administrators’ policy ambiguity in balancing institutional goals. These divergent perspectives led to uncertainty in AEs’ role expectations.
Graduate students
Graduate students’ conflicting perspectives on academic entrepreneurship centered on developmental (mis)alignment—their views diverged depending on whether they saw entrepreneurship as advancing or hindering their academic growth and career goals. Students who were in favor of their supervisors’ entrepreneurship shared beliefs such as the following:
S2: I think it’s important for us to accumulate more practical experience, and I hope our supervisor can give us some practical opportunities.
However, there were negative opinions as well:
S1: Undertaking entrepreneurship will do harm to teaching and research… I hope AEs to take more responsibilities as educators and focus on teaching and student supervision.
Notably, some students opposed their supervisors’ entrepreneurship because they felt they were being used as “cheap labor,” which hindered their personal development:
S5: [In my supervisor’s company,] my work is trivial and repetitive, which is a waste of time and energy. I have my own study plans, but now time is not free and sufficient.
S6: My supervisor’s company is a small one, and the subsidy does not meet my expectations… but I’m too embarrassed to tell my supervisor what I really think.
The fact that S6 felt too embarrassed to give honest feedback to his supervisor illustrates the apparent lack of mutual understanding between AEs and graduate students.
On the other hand, from the perspective of the AE interviewees, students were not sufficiently capable of accomplishing more advanced tasks in their company. Therefore, they preferred to ask their students to complete more simple and basic work.
A2: The students may expect more because they tend to think highly of themselves. However, they may not be able to handle the more complicated tasks.
Another interviewee recalled having to redo the work done by his students because of its low quality:
A7: [There was a project which] I asked a student to do it at the early stage, but he made a lot of bugs. I checked them one by one and finally solved all the bugs myself.
The data indicate that AE’s face a dual-bind ethical dilemma in managing their role conflicts. On the one hand, in their role as educators, they are committed to fostering students’ professional development by providing hands-on learning opportunities through entrepreneurial activities. On the other hand, their entrepreneur role demands risk mitigation, leading to reluctance to delegate critical tasks to students. This tension manifests in a paradox: AEs withhold meaningful tasks to protect their ventures, inadvertently reducing students to peripheral roles that feel exploitative (“trivial work”) rather than educational. The resulting frustration among students—who perceive unmet promises of skill building—erodes trust and exacerbates AEs’ cognitive dissonance, as their actions contradict their educator ethos. This conflict underscores how immature entrepreneurial ecosystems lack institutional safeguards to reconcile pedagogical obligations with business pragmatism.
Non-entrepreneur academics
Non-entrepreneur academics’ conflicting perspectives stemmed from legitimacy debates—disagreements about whether academic entrepreneurship aligns with the mission of research universities and the roles of faculty. For example, one interviewee expressed a positive attitude:
T1: Engaging in entrepreneurship proves beneficial for enhancing academics’ knowledge in the field.
However, other interviewees were not in favor of academic entrepreneurship because they perceived it as incompatible with the mission of a research university:
T2: If some academics regard entrepreneurship as their major work and teaching and research as their sidelines, it is not conducive to the long-term development of research universities.
Some non-entrepreneur academics held more neutral views, positing that “academic entrepreneurship is a personal pursuit” (T3) and that the institutional atmosphere for academics was becoming more inclusive and accepting in China.
The data above indicate that non-entrepreneur academics had inconsistent perspectives on whether “entrepreneur” is a legitimate role of an academic. Some AEs remarked that other academics did not always applaud their entrepreneurial activities, which created an unsupportive environment for their entrepreneurial activities:
A9: It’s almost impossible to gain resources through personal connections in the university community…They are not willing to share any resources with you—of course, they express it very implicitly.
This finding is in stark contrast with De Silva’s (2016) research, in which entrepreneurial and other academics complemented each other’s roles for the common good of their institution. The AEs in our study seldom cooperated with other academics or sought help from them. As the role receiver, the AEs received the role expectation that their entrepreneurial activities would not be fully supported by their university colleagues.
The divergent stances of non-entrepreneur academics reflect a broader ideological struggle over the legitimacy of market-driven logic within academia. Those viewing entrepreneurship as legitimate often tie it to institutional modernity and national innovation agendas. Conversely, critics framing it as illegitimate perceive entrepreneurship as a corrosive force that commodifies knowledge. This polarization creates a cultural schism that intensifies AEs’ role conflicts. Even colleagues with neutral attitudes, by refusing to engage, indirectly sustain institutional ambivalence, forcing AEs to navigate unspoken judgments and fragmented support networks. The resulting identity strain is exacerbated in immature ecosystems lacking consensus, further fragmenting AE’s professional identity.
University administrators
University administrators’ conflicting perspectives highlighted policy ambiguity: despite skepticism toward AEs, they acknowledged the potential for entrepreneurial ventures to add institutional value. On the one hand, the administrators felt that academics engaging in entrepreneurship do not assume corresponding responsibilities for their universities:
AM1: I suspect that academics start their own businesses probably because of their interest in financial gains—who doesn’t want to make a lot of money?
AM3: [AEs] are still paid by their university when they start a business, but they don’t take the responsibility they should.
AM4: Although at the national level, academic entrepreneurship is being promoted, starting a business disperses the energy of academic staff, many of whom take permanent positions. Universities are not market institutions.
The marketisation of universities is a controversial topic in China. Because the country has a socialist market economy, profit-oriented entrepreneurial activities are considered discordant with the public affairs of higher education, wherein most academic staff have permanent positions and are paid by the state. Such conflict will intensify if an AE ignores their duties at the university:
AM4: The university checked if the academics involved in entrepreneurial activities were paid without completing their university duties and found that some of them did not have enough workload.
As a result, university administrators were cautious about the entrepreneurial activities of academics. Nevertheless, they paradoxically anticipated that the successes of AEs would amplify the institutional recognition of the university:
AM2: Frankly speaking, we hope they [AEs] will succeed in their business wholeheartedly, and then they may bring donations to the university.
AM3: The university values patent application and transformation since they are advocated for by the country.
As a consequence of the ambivalence in attitudes, AEs may feel that their universities offer them little support in their entrepreneurial role:
A5: The university certainly does not encourage academics to start their own businesses because it has to meet certain measurements as a Double First-Class University.Footnote 1
A1: It is understandable that the university leaders still want me to focus on teaching and research; after all, the university also has a mission.
The AEs also referenced a lack of policy support for entrepreneurship in universities. They referred to a policy that proposes support and encouragement of technical personnel to engage in entrepreneurial activities on a part-time basis or to temporarily leave their post to start a business. However, they noted that “some supporting measures have not been fully implemented” (A3) and that “it is one thing to make a policy but another to implement it” (A1). Another interviewee, A10, used the term “inertia” in describing how universities still evaluate AEs according to their academic publications and ignore their entrepreneurial contributions due to the pressure to create world-class universities and secure national funding.
Competing institutional demands and ambiguous expectations led one interviewee to doubt the legitimacy of introducing entrepreneurial information in his lectures:
A2: Chinese teachers have huge responsibilities…So, university teachers shouldn’t talk about entrepreneurship in class. I think it’s very important in China…But now, a strange thing is that the university encourages students to start their own businesses…
The interviewee’s account implies that there was still uncertainty regarding whether the university genuinely promoted academic entrepreneurship. For AEs, this creates a challenging dilemma: they are incentivized to innovate for institutional glory but receive little structural support.
Coping strategies of AEs
Based on the data, we can identify five coping strategies: role affirmation, role integration, role compartmentalization, role delegation, and role retreatism. While positive role affirmation, integration, compartmentalization, and delegation may help resolve the role conflicts that AEs experienced, negative role compartmentalization, delegation, and retreatism may intensify these conflicts.
Role affirmation
Some AEs employed self-affirmation strategies to justify their role as entrepreneur and to achieve cognitive coherence, framing their entrepreneurial activities as aligned with broader societal and institutional values. For instance, A7 emphasized the societal urgency of addressing China’s technological challenges:
A7: There are a lot of technology problems in China… But…in fact, not many papers directly help the revitalization of the country. This is one of the reasons why I started my own business… “Everyone has a duty to their country.”Footnote 2
Another AE conceptualized academic entrepreneurship as an extension of their institutional responsibilities:
A10: Academic entrepreneurship is the transformation of research results, which is also part of a university teacher’s responsibility… For example, we have a chance to provide students with practical chances (in our companies). It’s also a form of talent training.
This self-affirmation process allowed AEs to reconcile their dual roles, reducing psychological dissonance, and mitigating the perceived conflict between academic duties and entrepreneurial pursuits.
Role integration
Some AEs integrated teaching, research, and entrepreneurship to reconcile conflicting role mandates by establishing a reciprocal relationship between these roles. The following two quotations exemplify how the entrepreneur role can be complementary to the educator role and the researcher role, respectively:
A2: I was exposed to a variety of projects in my entrepreneurial activities, and I would integrate some practical cases into my class.
A6: After starting a company, I gained a deeper insight into science and technology.
Some interviewees mentioned the advantages of their academic roles for their entrepreneurial activities as well, for example:
A5: The university experience laid a good foundation for me to start my company… We attend many conferences to understand the domestic and foreign trends. The university experience helps me grasp the development direction of my enterprise.
Evidently, the resources and benefits afforded by the academic and entrepreneurial roles can be integrated to complement each other.
Role compartmentalization
Through role compartmentalization (Quah, 2020), a person can separate multiple roles—both in time and space—to manage the unique and often contradictory demands of each role more effectively. This strategy was observed in our study in the separation of academic and entrepreneurial duties through spatial and time arrangements. For instance, A3 noted, “I currently work at university two days a week and at my company the rest of the time.” Such strategy allowed AEs to sort out the priorities of their work:
A2: When you are at university, you are fully engaged in research and teaching and trying not to take company-related calls, and when you are at the company, you are seriously managing the company’s affairs.
Role compartmentalization can reduce role pressure. It eliminates the need to perform multiple roles simultaneously, thereby reducing role conflict and ambiguity.
However, we also identified a type of role compartmentalization that might be unique to the Chinese context. Specifically, some AEs kept their entrepreneurial role inconspicuous while at the university:
A6: Although entrepreneurship is supported by national policies, it is a bit sensitive because I also have a post at university. There are some controversies around academic entrepreneurship, so we try to keep a low profile. I don’t usually talk about our company with university colleagues, and they won’t visit our company either.
To triangulate the perspectives of the AEs, we used data from the university administrators and students, who were in a better position to talk explicitly about the controversies surrounding academic entrepreneurship:
AM: The university collects statistics [of faculty starting businesses] every year, and the faculty declare voluntarily. Some have, some haven’t. Many faculty have companies, but if you ask to pay a visit, they won’t let you… There are several reasons. First, they are afraid that others will think they have no right to work in the university during the assessment process…Another reason is that they don’t want anyone to know about their business in case of failure…Besides, when your company gets better, the university will ask for donations, and your colleagues and peers will ask you for favors. So, Chinese people traditionally do things with a low profile.
One of the students commented on this matter as follows:
S1: It seems to me that it is mainly a cultural factor. Teachers do not take the amount of money they earn as their pride. In contrast, being poor and selflessly dedicated to their work is regarded as the honorary spirit of teachers. Therefore, they can’t explicitly talk about their entrepreneurial activities.
While remaining subtle about entrepreneurship might avoid surface-level role conflicts, this strategy could escalate external role expectation conflicts in the long term by prohibiting effective communication among university stakeholders. Furthermore, it is at odds with the national policy of encouraging academic entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurial role of AEs is marginalized by acquiescence to the permeating university discourse.
Role delegation
The role delegation mechanism described by Jain et al. (2009) refers to the establishment of appropriate interfaces with other actors within and outside of the university who have the relevant skills to commercialize their technologies for the purpose of protecting the primacy of the academic role. However, the present research reveals that AEs not only delegated their entrepreneurial work to others to commercialize their technologies but also delegated their academic duties to their graduate students to relieve time pressures. While the former is reasonable, the latter may intensify the conflict between AEs and their students. One example of positive delegation is as follows:
A7: I rarely participate in business negotiations of our company—not only because it does not fit with my academic identity but also because I’m not good at it.
In this case, A7 delegated some company-related work to other people who had the relevant business negotiation skills.
Meanwhile, in some negative instances, AEs delegated their work to graduate students, which was detrimental to the student-supervisor relationship. Although no AE admitted to employing such a strategy, A9 recalled observing other AEs using it:
A9: … [some AEs] are instilling in students the idea that “you have to work for me and help me with my projects.” Most students resist it because they become a cheap labor force. I should say this is the norm.
This perspective is triangulated by the data from a student interviewee:
S6: My supervisor had many projects and then asked students to do chores, which occupied a lot of our study and research time, but we could not refuse it. I think this is really a big headache.
Negative role delegation is related to role retreatism, which is analyzed in the next section.
Role retreatism
The AEs confessed that they would often temporarily retreat from the obligations of one role to alleviate multiple role conflicts. In an overlap with the role delegation strategy, some AEs asked their students to fulfill some of their academic obligations for them. A2 mentioned, “I still have a research project, but basically, my students are doing it.” A consequence of role retreatism is an imbalance in work performance between roles. For instance, both A2 and A4 reported that they had filed more patents for their companies but published fewer research papers.
Another common scenario was sacrificing teaching time for the sake of research and entrepreneurship, as the following example illustrates:
A5: It’s true that after starting a business, there’s definitely less time for student supervision and lesson preparation. Research and entrepreneurship have taken up all the time from me.
Positive strategies can alleviate inter-role conflict by reconciling goal divergency, offsetting risk, and improving time management. However, passive strategies may exacerbate role expectation conflicts, aggravate the suspicions of other members of the university community, and ultimately be detrimental to the creation of a supportive ecosystem for academic entrepreneurship.
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