مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تأثیر مکان کنترل بر شناخت فرصت کارآفرینان – الزویر 2019

The ability of individuals to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities is the decisive factor in their decision to pursue entrepreneurship as a career. Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate the role of locus of control on opportunity recognition (OR) among aspiring entrepreneurs. With a two-wave survey data of 270 aspiring entrepreneurs, our results suggest that internal and external locus of control have positive and negative relationships with aspiring entrepreneurs’ OR, respectively. The findings also show that entrepreneurial intention mediates the positive and negative relationships of internal and external locus of control on OR. Entrepreneurial searching self-efficacy (ESSE) provides an interesting moderating effect. The study sheds light on an important but rarely explored research area: OR among aspiring entrepreneurs. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Introduction

The psychological understanding of why people decide to become entrepreneurs despite the countless entrepreneurial failure stories continues to interest researchers. Scholars have consistently sought to find out how psychological attributes influence individuals’ entrepreneurial decisions (Ardichvili, Cardozo, & Ray, 2003; Grégoire, Barr, & Shepherd, 2010; Shu, Ren, & Zheng, 2018). This line of research has included attributes such as feelings and moods (Baron, 2008), prior knowledge (Shane, 2000), human capital (Bhagavatula, Elfring, van Tilburg, & van de Bunt, 2010) and cognitive processes (Grégoire et al., 2010). Findings from these studies suggest that such psychological attributes have a profound impact on the quality of entrepreneurial decisions people make. As such, the potential for studying how and why some individuals prefer to be entrepreneurs while others prefer to be employees is relevant and pressing. For example, many people continue to pursue this “risky career” of entrepreneurship (Krueger & Dickson, 1994), when there are opportunities for them to be employees with salary assurance. Previous scholars (Ardichvili et al., 2003; Erez & Judge, 2001) have argued that personality plays an important role in these career decisions.