Abstract:This paper discusses the effects of gap between aspiration and performance on entrepreneur’s creative and destructive activities and explores the moderate effect of political ties. Using the data of Chinese listed family firms, several main conclusions are drawn as follows. First, entrepreneurs increase their creative and destructive activities with firms’ past performance above firm based aspiration (historical comparison) and firm’s performance below aspiration (both historical and social comparison) , but they reduce those risk-taking behaviors when performance is above social-based aspiration (social comparison). Second, marginal effect of conducting destructive activities with performance below aspiration is much higher than taking such activities with performance above aspiration. Marginal effect of taking creative activities with performance below social-based aspiration is lower than conducting creative actions with performance above aspiration, and which is even stronger in the model of historical comparison. Third, moderate effect of political ties on the relationship between aspiration gap and entrepreneur’s risk decision making is significant especially in the condition of negative gap between performance and aspiration. When performance is below aspiration, political ties decrease entrepreneur’s motivations of conducting creative activities and induce them to allocate more resources into destructive activities.