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Explaining entrepreneurial intentions, nascent entrepreneurial behavior and new business creation with social cognitive career theory – a 5-year longitudinal analysis

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Abstract

Scholars conceptualize entrepreneurial behavior (EB) as the actions taken for new venture creation, which are said to manifest from an individual’s intention to become an entrepreneur (EI). Though theoretically supported, predicting EB through EI faces many operationalization challenges, is rarely empirically reported, and presents methodological inconsistencies. Addressing these issues will improve our ability to identify emerging and successful new business venturers and facilitate further entrepreneurial stimulation of populations. Using both a cross-sectional and a 5-year longitudinal research design, we study the applicability of social cognitive career theory (SCCT) in explaining EI and EB for a sample of 1,149 Portuguese college students. The cross-sectional results support SCCT’s ability to explain students’ intentions in this large student population. Furthermore, with a smaller subsample, longitudinal analysis confirms intentions, as predictive of nascent EB, towards successful new business creation. In contrast to the theory’s propositions, we find that entrepreneurial self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations do not add to EI’s ability to predict EB. This study contributes to the currently scarce empirical support for SCCT as an appropriate model explaining EI and is the first to apply this theory’s core model to test the EI-EB link longitudinally. This study may be relevant to educators and policymakers who want to promote and assist college students in creating their own new businesses.

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Data availability

The data from EEP Portugal Dataset, in which this study was based upon, may be provided upon request to the corresponding author.

Code availability

Not applicable.

Notes

  1. Nascent entrepreneurs are defined as “individuals who initiate serious activities that are intended to lead to the formation of a viable new venture, but have not finally become legal business owners” (Zapkau et al. 2017, p. 56).

  2. Following McGee’s et al. (2009) seminal article, all EFAs were performed via principal component analysis (PCA) extraction and varimax with Kaiser normalization as the rotation method.

  3. Although some authors (e.g., McGee et al. 2009) have used a validation criterium of ‘at least two activities’ to identify a nascent entrepreneur, here, to be more confident of real nascent behavior, three activities were excluded from the previous list, as these did not meet the same standards as the rest in assuring the identification of dedicated/purposeful EB. Namely, the following activities were considered ineligible: (7) ‘Developed models’, (12) ‘Attended a ‘start your own business’ seminar or conference’ and (13) ‘Wrote a business plan or participated in seminars that focus on writing a business plan.’ To compensate for this reduced domain of eligible activities, it was considered sufficient for only one of all other nascent activities to be completed for someone to be identified as having behaved entrepreneurially.

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Funding

We gratefully acknowledge financial support received from FCT- Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal) national funding, provided through research grant UIDB/04521/2020 and doctoral grant ref: SFRH/BD/73520/2010.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

RFB wrote the initial draft of this manuscript, after being directly involved in data collection (as the coordinator of the EEP Portugal research group), and its analysis (as part of his Ph.D. thesis: Belchior 2019).

RL has critically reviewed the paper’s first draft and made a major contribution to its final structure, focus and readability.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ricardo Figueiredo Belchior.

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Appendix

Appendix

Nascent Entrepreneurial Behavior (Nascent EB) measurement was conducted based on the international Entrepreneurship Education Project’sFootnote 3 first follow-up survey citing Carter et al. (1996) for items 1 to 11 and McGee et al. (2009) for items 12 to 16 as questions asked of participants if they had completed any of the following nascent activities:

  1. (1)

    Bought facilities / equipment;

  2. (2)

    Rented facilities / equipment;

  3. (3)

    Looked for facilities;

  4. (4)

    Invested own money;

  5. (5)

    Asked for funding;

  6. (6)

    Got financial support;

  7. (7)

    Not applicable (see footnote)

  8. (8)

    Devoted fulltime to business;

  9. (9)

    Applied for license / patent;

  10. (10)

    Formed a legal entity;

  11. (11)

     Hired employees;

  12. (12)

     Not applicable (see footnote)

  13. (13)

     Not applicable (see footnote)

  14. (14)

    Put together a start-up team;

  15. (15)

    Saved money to invest in the business;

  16. (16)

    Developed a product or service.

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Belchior, R.F., Lyons, R. Explaining entrepreneurial intentions, nascent entrepreneurial behavior and new business creation with social cognitive career theory – a 5-year longitudinal analysis. Int Entrep Manag J 17, 1945–1972 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-021-00745-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11365-021-00745-7

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