This study builds and tests a model that explains entrepreneurs’ emotional responses to events in their work lives while specifying the role of entrepreneurs’ personality in moderating such responses. Drawing on the cognitive appraisal theory, we hypothesize that daily entrepreneurial stressors (workload and financial) exert negative influences on two discrete emotions (fear and pride) and that entrepreneurs’ neuroticism and dispositional optimism can moderate the proposed relationships. We examined daily diary data of 61 entrepreneurs over a two-week period and found multilevel evidence of individual differences in entrepreneurs’ emotional responses to these stressors at both the between- and within-person levels of analysis. We also found that neuroticism and optimism partially account for the examined relationships across both levels. This study contributes to the literature on stress-related emotional experiences in an entrepreneurial context by taking into account the type of stressor and the temporal framework across levels of analysis.

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