07/07/2026
By Cintya Gajardo Vejar

The Manning School of Business, Department of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation, invites you attend the doctoral dissertation defense by Cintya Gajardo-Vejar on “The Language of Entrepreneurial Mentoring: How Mentor’s Language Shapes Mentee’s Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy Through Construal Level and Gender.”

Candidate: Cintya L. Gajardo-Vejar.
Degree: Ph.D. in Business Administration, Concentration in Entrepreneurship.

Date: Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Time: 2–3:30 p.m.
Location: Hybrid – Pulichino Tong Business Center, Room 205, and via Zoom

Dissertation Advisors: Michael Ciuchta, Ph.D., and Ann Kronrod, Ph.D.
Committee Member: Cheryl Wakslak, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California.

Abstract:
Entrepreneurial mentoring plays a critical role in entrepreneurial development, yet research has devoted limited attention to how mentors communicate with entrepreneurs. Drawing on construal level theory, gender research, and the entrepreneurial mentoring literature, I examine whether mentor gender, mentee gender, and perceived social distance influence the linguistic concreteness of entrepreneurial mentoring and whether communication concreteness influences entrepreneurial self-efficacy. I test these relationships using a multi-method research design consisting of a pretest, two online experiments, and one longitudinal field study that combines behavioral conversational data with survey measures collected from an entrepreneurial accelerator program in Chile.

The findings provided support for the positive effect of concrete mentoring language on entrepreneurial self-efficacy, whereas evidence for the proposed effects of mentor gender, mentee gender, and perceived social distance on mentoring language was mixed. Across the experimental studies, entrepreneurs who received more concrete mentoring guidance reported higher entrepreneurial self-efficacy than entrepreneurs who received more abstract guidance. By contrast, mentor gender, mentee gender, and perceived social distance did not consistently predict the linguistic concreteness of mentoring communication across alternative computational measures. Although I found some evidence that female mentors used more concrete language than male mentors and that male mentors communicated more concretely with female mentees under one operationalization of linguistic concreteness, these relationships did not generalize across measures or study contexts.

I contribute to entrepreneurship and mentoring research by introducing linguistic concreteness as a measurable characteristic of entrepreneurial mentoring communication and by demonstrating that communication style represents an important mechanism through which mentoring influences entrepreneurial self-efficacy. I also extend research on entrepreneurial mentoring by examining how mentor gender and mentee gender relate to the linguistic concreteness of mentoring communication and showing that these relationships were not consistent across measures and study contexts. Collectively, these findings encourage researchers to move beyond asking whether mentoring influences entrepreneurs and toward understanding how mentoring communication shapes entrepreneurial development.