The antecedents of entrepreneurial intentionthe role of social networks, social capital, personality traits and affect

Resumen

Entrepreneurship is any attempt at new venture or new business creation. These new ventures generally create value in advancing innovations, promoting productivity and generating employment. In this sense, entrepreneurship is a key factor for the economic and social development. Despite these advantages, the total early stage entrepreneurial activity in more than fifty countries, which consist of the total nascent entrepreneurs and the owner managers of a new business, is low (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor –GEM–, 2018). Therefore, there is a demand to encourage and develop entrepreneurship among individuals. This is even more important in young individuals since the emergence of new technologies and Internet have greatly expanded the entrepreneurial possibilities, and they are more familiar with these new technological advances. There is still room to improve our understanding of why individuals decide to start up. Entrepreneurship is a very particular type of behaviour, characterized by its peculiarity, its difficulty to observe it and its unpredictable time delays. In this sense, entrepreneurial intention is one of the best predictor of entrepreneurial behaviour (Bird, 1988) since the thirty seven percent of individuals, who had reported entrepreneurial intention a year before, have showed an entrepreneurial behaviour (Kautonen, Gelderen and Fink, 2015). Entrepreneurial intention can be defined as the desire to own or to start a new business (Krueger et al., 2000). Therefore, one of the possible ways to encourage entrepreneurship by policy makers, institutions, and universities is through developing entrepreneurial intentions of individuals. In the same way that entrepreneurial activity is low, entrepreneurial intentions are also low. The findings of GEM shows that entrepreneurial intentions are especially low in the countries where the income is high, where the average percentage of individuals among 18 and 64 years that have manifested their intentions to start up in the next three years is 20.4%. These intentions to start up are worse for the 28 countries of European Union with an average of 14.1%. In Spain, only the 6.8% of adult individuals show entrepreneurial intention (GEM, 2018). In addition, the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Student’s Survey (GUESSS, 2018) shows that only the 9.0 % of all students intend to be an entrepreneur directly after finishing their studies. This entrepreneurial intention is different across countries, particularly Latin American countries exhibiting the highest percentages. Spain obtains one of the lowest results, only the 4.5% of Spanish students intend to be an entrepreneur directly after studies. Therefore, both GEM and GUESS show that Spain needs a boost of the entrepreneurial intentions as a key element that will outstandingly impact the entrepreneurial capabilities of the society in the future. In particular, we choose the university students as a target population because this segment of the population has specific knowledge and competences that could be exploited through new ventures (Galloway and Brown, 2002), especially in terms of new technologies and Internet because of their easier adoption these technologies (Morris and Venkatesh, 2000). Going one step further, Turker and Selcuk (2009) claim that “Since today’s youth are the potential entrepreneurs of the future, understanding their perception about contextual factors can be a contribution to the development of the literature and an important step in designing a more effective policy mechanism.” (p.142). In sum, higher education students are interesting and appropriate in studies on nascent entry into entrepreneurship (Hsu, Simmons, and Wieland, 2017). Given these antecedents, this doctoral dissertation aims to provide a more comprehensive view of the determinants of entrepreneurial intention in higher education students. To accomplish this general objective, this dissertation takes into account that entrepreneurial intention is part of the individual’s cognition (Mitchell, Busenitz, Lant, McDougall, Morse, and Smith, 2002). Therefore, we firstly inquire which factors relevant for the general cognition of individuals can be also important for developing entrepreneurial intention. In particular, we focus on four different factors, not previously studied, namely, social capital, social networks, personality traits and affect. Being clear about the factors under study, we proceed with data collection on higher education students. Although databases like GEM or GUESS have some advantages for the study of entrepreneurial intention, such as the possible comparison among regions and countries, these databases do not take into account other specific factors that can be of interest. Therefore, we develop a survey focused on the different factors for developing entrepreneurial intention and conducted in two universities from Spain. This data collection is the empirical basis for the four empirical studies that aim to address four specific research objectives. In general, this dissertation addresses to the Fayolle and Liñan’s (2014) recommendation about the expansion of the antecedents, moderators and mediators of entrepreneurial intention. By providing a more comprehensive view, research will enable to provide useful ways to promote entrepreneurial intention among individuals. The first specific research objective of this dissertation is to improve the existing understanding of the influence of social capital online on entrepreneurial intentions. Social networks sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram represent a fundamental change in human interactions (Papacharissi, 2010), having great importance in the development of social capital among individuals (Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe, 2007; Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe, 2010). Therefore, entrepreneurs can use the technical affordances of these SNSs in order to develop their social capital online (Smith, Smith and Shaw, 2017). Although social capital offline has been widely studied in entrepreneurship (Gedajlovic et al., 2013), the online context is so different that offline research findings may not apply (Ellison and Boyd, 2013; Papacharissi, 2010). Therefore, we focus on the analysis of social capital online. In doing so, we use Nahapiet and Ghosal (1998) who considers that social capital is formed by three different dimensions: structural, relational and cognitive. Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB; Azjen, 1991) has been the most common theoretical framework used to investigate entrepreneurial intention (Schlaegel and Koenig, 2014). According to TPB, three different cognitive factors determine intention: the attitude towards a certain behavior, the social norms about that behavior and the perceived control of the behavior (Ajzen, 1991). We use TPB in our dissertation due to its applicability and because numerous studies prove its validity (Kolvereid, 1996; Krueger et al., 2000; Kolvereid and Isaksen, 2006; Liñán and Chen, 2009; Kautonen et al., 2015). Therefore, based on social cognitive theory, we explore the importance of social capital online in the first cognitive steps of entrepreneurship, i.e., entrepreneurial intention. In particular, we analyse how the three dimensions of social capital online impact on the development of the three antecedents of entrepreneurial intention. The second specific research objective of this dissertation is to improve the existing understanding of the impact of affect on entrepreneurial intention. Psychological literature shows the key influence of affect and emotions on individual cognition (Bower, 1991; Forgas, 1995; Rusting, 1998). Following these arguments, it is necessary to study the relation between affect and cognition in order to advance the knowledge in entrepreneurial cognition (Baron, 2008). Although the influence of affect and emotions on entrepreneurship has been studied in different stages of opportunity identification, opportunity evaluation and opportunity exploitation (e.g. Baron, Tang, and Hmieleski, 2011; Foo, 2011; Podoynitsyna et al., 2012; Foo et al., 2015), the earlier stages of entrepreneurial process have received less attention in the previous research (Delgado-García et al., 2015). Since entrepreneurial intention and its three antecedents of TPB are also cognitive in nature (Krueger and Casrud, 1993; Mitchell et al., 2002), we develop arguments regarding the influence of affect on these antecedents. Among the different components of affect, we focus on affective traits because these dispositions are important to entrepreneurial decision-making (Nikolaev et al., 2019) and entrepreneurial behavior is a consequence of having intention over time (Hsu, Burmeister-Lamp, Simmons, Foo, Hong, and Pipes, 2019). Furthermore, traditional research considers two different dimensions of affect: (1) intensity or arousal (high to low) and (2) valence or hedonic tone (positive to negative) (Larsen and Diener 1992). In this dissertation, we consider the study of affective valence, i.e, positive and negative affect, because individuals are more efficient in processing information that is consistent with their affective valence, influencing the cognition of these individuals (Forgas, 1995; Rusting, 1998). More specifically, we analyse if positive and negative affective traits influence the development of the three antecedents of entrepreneurial intention. The third specific research objective of this dissertation is to improve existing understanding of the double path for the influence of affective traits on entrepreneurial intention. Previous research in entrepreneurship has argued that entrepreneurship can only be described by the interaction of personal and situational factors (Hodgetts and Kuratko, 2001) so that a theory which does not consider these factors simultaneously overly reduces the complexity of entrepreneurship (Tett and Burnett 2003). Hence, this study wants to deeper explore the previously found influence of affective traits on entrepreneurial intention, by considering social networks size, which is the most objective measure within social networks (both online and offline), as the situational factor of study. Specifically, we propose that affective traits may influence entrepreneurial intention not only because of their role in individuals’ cognition, but also by the mediating effect of both online and offline social networks. That is, affect can influence on entrepreneurial intention through two paths. The first path is a direct influence of affect on entrepreneurial cognition (Forgas, 1995; Baron, 2008), which is based on a perceptual influence. The second path is based on a more objective influence since previous literature in entrepreneurship suggests that affect may influence entrepreneurs’ social networks (Hayton and Cholakova, 2012). The fourth specific research objective of this doctoral dissertation is to improve the understanding of how need for achievement intensifies the impact of social networks on entrepreneurial intention. This study is also based on the idea of the interaction of personal and situational factors (Hodgetts and Kuratko, 2001). Personality traits have been traditionally related with entrepreneurship. However, previous research has not always found consistent effects in these relationships (Rauch and Frese, 2007b). One possible explanation is trait activation theory, which explains that personality traits are manifested when the environment activates these particular traits (Tett and Burnett, 2003). We apply this theory to entrepreneurial intention to evaluate the importance of social environment factors in the activation of specific personality traits of individuals. In particular, we consider that need for achievement, one of the more important personality trait for entrepreneurship (Rauch and Frese, 2007b), can be activated in the context of social networks, intensifying the influence of these social networks on entrepreneurial intention. In doing so, we advance in the understanding of the role of need for achievement in a different way than previous literature on entrepreneurship (Frank, Lueger, and Korunka, 2007; Hack, von Bieberstein, and Kraiczy, 2016). Additionally, we also contribute to the study of social networks, considering that these social networks are different in terms of resources and the nature of the relationships that endow those resources (Gedajlovic et al., 2013). To address the objectives described above, this doctoral dissertation is structured in six chapters, as depicted in Figure I. Chapter 1 presents the review of the literatures on entrepreneurial intention, social networks and social capital and personality and affective traits and on the integration of these literatures, all relevant theoretical bases for this dissertation. Chapter 1 also describes the research objectives of the dissertation and the data collection to accomplish those objectives. The four following chapters, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, present the empirical studies (Study I, Study II, Study III and Study IV, respectively). Finally, Chapter 6 provides concluding remarks, highlighting the limitations and main practical implications of the four studies of the dissertation, as well as interesting paths for future research.