Volume 13, Issue 2

Although it is widely accepted that entrepreneurial orientation (EO) improves firm performance, scholars have advised that particular attention should be paid to the context. In this research, we investigate a less explored context of franchising where business systems and procedures are usually dictated to franchisees by franchisors. Therefore, whether a franchisor should allow franchisees to pursue EO (innovativeness, proactiveness, risk-taking, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy) is not clear. In the context of franchising, the majority of prior studies have mainly focused on the employment of EO as a unidimensional construct and at the franchisor level. In this research, we take a bottom-up perspective and evaluate the impact of different dimensions of EO on franchisees’ performance. Our analysis of a multi-group of 183 restaurant franchisees located in Sweden and Iran reveals that only the pursuit of proactiveness and competitive aggressiveness improves a franchisee’s performance and other dimensions do not play a significant role in improving performance in this context.

This research addresses how entrepreneurs may make different decisions compared to non-entrepreneurs when they face the same opportunities. We begin by considering the nexus between opportunities and entrepreneurs/non-entrepreneurs. From an entrepreneur’s perspective, based on dual-process theory, we examine how different thinking styles influence decision-making. From an opportunity perspective, based on prospect theory, we test how different types of opportunity framing influence decision-making. The results indicate that entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs assess opportunities differently. Our research design also provides a new method to elicit both the subjective value model and the probability-weighting model.

This study seeks to understand the main factors predicting the future entrepreneurial attitude and intention of higher education students. To do so, a questionnaire was sent to a sample of 508 students at a higher education institution (HEI) in the central region of Portugal. From a structural equation model, the results show that students’ entrepreneurial attitude is influenced positively, and with statistical significance, by Entrepreneurial Benefits, Entrepreneurial Passion, Psychological Cognition Factors and Religion Beliefs. On the other hand, the factors/dimensions of Self-Confidence and Creativity are found not to have a statistically significant influence on the Entrepreneurial Attitude of the students studied. In turn, entrepreneurial attitude was a direct and mediated predictor of students’ entrepreneurial intention. The results of the study can explain the influence of important factors on students’ entrepreneurial attitude and intention, presenting relevant challenges for HEIs to develop and provide more courses and programmes aimed at entrepreneurship. Such initiatives are a way to motivate students to be future entrepreneurs, raising business development and growth in the economy in general, and the country in particular. This study also makes an important contribution to the literature on higher education students’ attitude towards entrepreneurship and its influence on their future entrepreneurial intention. People with a strong entrepreneurial attitude and intention are needed to allow development, growth and innovation in the business sector. These actions can motivate students to be future entrepreneurs raising the business development and growth of the economy in general.

The purpose of this study is to explore the direct and interaction effects of entrepreneurial events (feasibility and desirability) and perceived risk (opportunity and threat) on entrepreneurial intention in a transitional economy – Vietnam. The testing results show that perceived desirability and perceived feasibility have direct and interactive effects on entrepreneur intention. Risk as both threat and as opportunity has direct and moderating effects on entrepreneurial intention.

The objective of this work is to examine the influence of formal institutions on the level of informal entrepreneurial activity in Latin American countries. We use a panel dataset for 18 countries during the 2004–2017 periods. This dataset has not been widely used for longitudinal research by academics in the field of entrepreneurship in developing countries. Using the percentage of the adult population identified as self-employed as a proxy for informal entrepreneurial activity, our results suggest that informal entrepreneurial activity is lower in Latin American countries that have stronger property rights and lighter business regulation. However, countries with more flexible labor regulation show higher informal entrepreneurial activity. Therefore, we believe there is margin for policy intervention to reduce informal entrepreneurial activities in Latin America.

The development of entrepreneurship education (EE) has become a top priority for many universities around the world. Accordingly, the objectives of this paper are to identify motivation profiles of university business students, to determine how profile membership predicts students’ entrepreneurial intention and interest to study entrepreneurship, and to identify predictors of membership in these motivation profiles. To achieve these objectives, our method entails the application of self-determination theory (SDT) in a person-centered analysis. Our study is, in fact, the first application of the full range of motivations from SDT to define students’ entrepreneurial motivations; furthermore, we use latent profile analysis to identify groups of students that can be distinguished according to these motivations. We discover four groups of students: 1) uniformly lowly motivated, 2) indifferent, 3) conflicted, and 4) uniformly highly and intrinsically motivated. We find that students in these groups differ with regard to their interest to study entrepreneurship and their intention to be entrepreneurs. We also identify psychological traits and background factors that could explain the group membership. We discuss the implications of these findings on the promotion and delivery of EE, and on how students may be motivated to become entrepreneurs.

This study investigates whether and how different decision logics (i.e., effectuation and causation) are linked to venture performance (i.e., annual average growth in revenue and profit as well as subjective assessments of venture performance and funding status). We also examine how dispositional characteristics of an entrepreneur (i.e., learning and performance goal orientations, ambiguity tolerance, desire for change, and locus of control) influence the use of different decision logics. The results indicate that causation has a significantly positive effect on revenue growth as well as subjective assessments of venture performance and funding status, while effectuation has a significantly negative effect on profit growth. We find that learning-goal orientation leads to a greater reliance on effectuation, while performance-goal orientation increases the use of causation. An internal locus of control positively affects the reliance on both effectuation and causation, while the desire for change increases the use of effectuation.

This study aims to (1) analyse whether university students’ psychological and cognitive factors influence the entrepreneurial intention and integration in academic hazing, and (2) assess the effect the entrepreneurial intention may have on integration in academic hazing. Using a sample of 258 new students from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the University of Beira – Portugal, we use structural equation model (SEM) to test our hypotheses. From the structural model, the outcomes reveal that students’ cognitive and psychological factors influence their entrepreneurial intention, but no statistically significant direct effects of these factors were found on academic hazing. Another conclusion is that the entrepreneurial intention has a positive influence on students’ academic hazing and there is an indirect effect of psychological factors on this relation. In this study, a new and innovative construct is inserted in the model of entrepreneurial intention: “Academic Hazing”. Academic hazing is characterised as a ritual of initiation for new students at universities.

Although prior research on late-career entrepreneurship has explored the effects of financial, human, and social capital on the intentions to engage in entrepreneurial activity within the domains of a developed economy, little research has investigated this scholarship in the context of a push perspective within a developing economy. This study endeavors to meet this gap by investigating the effects of financial, social, and human capital and the personal dispositional traits on the entrepreneurial intentions among early retirees in the ICT sector of Pakistan. Based on the collected data from the web-based questionnaire and personally administered surveys and interviews from 345 respondents who face a survival challenge in the aftermath of a job loss, we make use of hierarchical logistic regression to periodically explore the independent and combined effects of the financial, social and human capital and the impact of a stable dispositional trait of fear of failure on the entrepreneurial intention. Being one of the foremost studies to address the late-career entrepreneurship phenomenon in a developing economy, this study has to offer notable contributions to entrepreneurship literature. Consistent with prior research, we observe support for the individual influence of various elements of financial, social, and human capital and the fear of failure on the intentions to engage in an entrepreneurial career. Results also demonstrate considerable evidence for the interaction effects among financial, human, and social capital as well as among different measures of financial capital, human capital, and the fear of failure. Discussion about the results is furnished followed by limitations and future research implications.

We investigate the effects of the local institutional profile on the antecedents of entrepreneurial intention. First, we advance a conceptual model based on the theory of planned behavior and on institutional theory. In our model, local government policies, regional shared social knowledge and local value systems affect cognition of individuals with regard to entrepreneurial intention. We then test our model using structural equation modeling (SEM) based on a survey of 2150 respondents in Brazil. The country is particularly interesting for the analysis since it presents a continental dimension, being formed by five regions with different geographic, economic, and social characteristics. Our regression models corroborate our hypotheses. Perceived behavior control is a function of both the local cognitive dimension and the local regulatory dimension. The personal attitude is determined by all the local institutional dimensions (cognitive, regulatory, and normative dimensions). Subjective norms, in turn, are a function of the local normative dimension. This effect is interesting because it points to regional variability in the way individuals appreciate entrepreneurial activity and how this translates into a statistically significant difference in entrepreneurial intention among the country’s regions.