Founder, Academic, or Employee? A Nuanced Study of Career Choice Intentions

Abstract

We add novel insights to the debate about why individuals choose to start their own firm by comparing entrepreneurial intentions to the intentions to work at a university as an academic and to be employed in a private firm. To model this more complex set of career choices, we examine novel multiplicative aspects of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and test our hypotheses on survey data of 15,866 students from 13 European countries. Multinomial logistic regression analyses reveal how the different TPB elements influence career preferences and demonstrate the moderating effects of perceived controllability and desirability.

The Family's Financial Support as a “Poisoned Gift”: A Family Embeddedness Perspective on Entrepreneurial Intentions

“…We used a large student sample generated by the GUESSS project in 2011 . In the past few years, several studies based on GUESSS data from 2006, 2008, and 2011 that investigate entrepreneurial intentions (e.g., Laspita et al ; Lima et al ; Sieger and Monsen ; Zellweger, Sieger, and Halter ) have been published. Student samples are commonly used in such research because scholars advocate studying individuals at the earliest possible stage of entrepreneurial activities (Kim, Aldrich, and Keister ), which applies to university students who have not yet made their first actual career choice.…”

The Entrepreneurship Industry: Influences of the Goods and Services Marketed to Entrepreneurs

“…Central to the individual-opportunity nexus are three elements: motivations, intentions, and goals (Gollwitzer and Brandst€ atter 1997). Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) holds that an individual's activity-specific intent is the most robust predictor of a given activity actually occurring (Ajzen 1991), including those arising in entrepreneurial contexts (Sieger and Monsen 2015). In turn, goals provide motivational substance that ultimately connects intentions and actions (Locke and Latham 2002;Nuttin 1984).…”

El impacto del entorno del estudiante en sus intenciones de crear una empresa cuando finalice sus estudios

“…Este proyecto se fundamenta en la Teoría del Comportamiento Planificado de Ajzen (1991) por lo que su uso se ajusta perfectamente a los objetivos y marco de este trabajo. Este modelo ha sido testado y validado en investigaciones previas (Lima et al, 2014;Bernhofer y Li, 2014;Zelleger et al, 2015;Sieger y Monsen, 2015). El trabajo de campo se realizó durante los meses de febrero y marzo del año 2015.…”