10/29/2025
By Cintya Gajardo Vejar

The Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation at the Manning School of Business invites you to attend a doctoral dissertation proposal by Cintya Gajardo-Vejar.

Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Time: 11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Location: Hybrid, Pulichino Tong Business Center (PTB) 462 or via Zoom 

Dissertation Title: The Language of Entrepreneurial Mentoring: How Construal Level and Gender Shape Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy.

Committee Members:

  • Michael Ciuchta, Ph.D. (Co-chair), Professor, Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation, Manning School of Business, UMass Lowell
  • Ann Kronrod, Ph.D. (Co-chair), Associate Professor, Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation, Manning School of Business, UMass Lowell
  • Cheryl Wakslak, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Management and Organization, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California

Abstract

This dissertation proposal investigates how construal levels and gender dynamics shape the language that mentors use when advising entrepreneurs, and how this, in turn, influences entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE). Building on Construal Level Theory (CLT) and gender-role frameworks, the study addresses a central theoretical tension between situationally driven accounts of linguistic abstraction, which posit that social distance determines message concreteness, and socially constructed accounts, which emphasize gendered communication norms and power hierarchies as sources of linguistic variation. Integrating these perspectives, the study proposes that mentor–mentee gender composition shapes perceived social distance, which subsequently affects the concreteness or abstractness of mentors’ language and the influence of their advice on mentees’ ESE.

A multi-method design combining experimental and field data tests this model. Controlled experiments examine how mentor and mentee gender interact to influence language concreteness and how construal fit, defined as the alignment between message framing and mentee psychological distance, affects ESE. Complementary field studies analyze transcripts from real mentoring sessions using computational linguistic methods to assess concreteness and its effects on ESE over time.

The findings are expected to make several contributions. Theoretically, the study identifies language concreteness as a novel micro-level communicative mechanism in entrepreneurial mentoring and addresses the tension between situational explanations derived from CLT and socially constructed explanations grounded in gender-role theory. By integrating these perspectives, the study provides a more comprehensive understanding of how mentor–mentee gender composition shapes communication patterns and mentoring effectiveness. Empirically, it examines how construal fit, or the alignment between advice abstraction and mentee gender, enhances or constrains ESE, thereby clarifying the conditions under which more abstract or more concrete guidance becomes most beneficial.