The “why” of international entrepreneurship: uncovering entrepreneurs’ personal values

Abstract

Previous studies investigating the "why" of entrepreneurial internationalization have focused on firm-level motivations, overlooking the relationships between firm-level and individual-level motivations and why entrepreneurs differ in the goals they intend to achieve. We investigate the role of personal values as desirable end states that motivate international entrepreneurship by functioning as superordinate cognitive structures that underlie the practical internationalization goals set by entrepreneurs. By adopting an idiographic approach based on a laddering methodology in a sample of 140 new domestic technology-based firms located in Northern Italy, we uncover and map the hierarchies of goals that motivate entrepreneurs' internationalization intentions, which are anchored in five personal values: achievement, power, self-direction, benevolence, and security. We discuss our theoretical and methodological contributions and the policy implications of our findings.

Personal values and characteristics of remittance channels: Insights from a means‐end‐chain study

“…To do this, I excluded those linkages that were not significant across the sample because they appeared only in a few respondents' ladders by calculating a cut-off level above which elements and linkages are represented (Appendix , Table A3). Applying a cut-off of three linkages, consistent with other studies (e.g., Bagozzi & Dabholkar, 1994;Bolzani & Foo, 2017;Pieters et al, 1995), I graphically represented 67% of total linkages. 9 The hierarchical value map for this study is shown in Figure 2.…”

Oh, the places you’ll go: A schema theory perspective on cross-cultural experience and entrepreneurship

“…We advance theory on the role of cross-cultural experiences and intercultural dynamics at the individual-level in entrepreneurship research (e.g., Bolzani and Foo, 2017 ; Clark et al., 2018 ; Jones and Casulli, 2014 ; Morgan et al., 2018 ; Williams and Gregoire, 2015 ). We specifically shed light on the influential role of cross-cultural experience in itself and the formation of intentions to engage in entrepreneurship.…”

Citizen participation in public administration: investigating open government for social innovation

“…First, there is a rather large unexplained variance in our results. Future investigations may want to combine SDT with other theoretical frameworks such as theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, ), goal setting theory (e.g., Locke and Latham, ), personal values (e.g., Bolzani and Foo, ), or theory of job design (Hackman and Oldham, ) to better understand citizen participation in open government platforms. Second, this analysis indicates that types of motivation are related to varying levels of platform activity.…”