انتقال بین نسلی اهداف کارآفرینی

We draw on cross-cultural theory and the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness project to develop a model for the transmission of entrepreneurial intentions within families in different cultures. Using data on more than 40,000 individuals from 15 countries, we show that beyond the transmission of entrepreneurial intentions from parents to children, grandparents – either directly or “indirectly” via the parents – impact the offspring's intentions. Moreover, we find that parents' and grandparents' influences partly substitute for one another. The strength of these effects varies across cultures. Our results provide a more detailed picture of the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurial intentions.

Family influences are crucial for the development of young people's occupational intentions (Jodl et al., 2001), and studies suggest that parents' entrepreneurial status triggers their offspring's entrepreneurial intentions (Matthews and Moser, 1996 and Scherer et al., 1989). For example, some scholars argue that exposure to a family business can predispose offspring's entrepreneurial intentions by increasing their perceptions that self-employment is a feasible career option (Krueger et al., 2000 and Sorensen, 2007). Moreover, evidence suggests that to some extent, entrepreneurial intentions can be inherited due to a genetic disposition for entrepreneurship (Nicolaou and Shane, 2010). While the above and other studies (Schmitt-Rodermund, 2004 and Wang and Wong, 2004) indicate that parents' entrepreneurial status plays an important role in the development of offspring's entrepreneurial intentions, little is known about the different transmission paths of entrepreneurial intentions across more than one generation. For example, most existing studies neglect the fact that grandparents also substantially influence the development and behavior of children (cf. Simons et al., 1991 and Van Ijzendoorn, 1992). Furthermore, the structures of and communication patterns within families differ substantially across cultures (House et al., 2004), suggesting that the paths through which entrepreneurial intentions are transmitted between generations vary. An exploration of this variance is important because it can advance our understanding of family influences on the development of entrepreneurial intentions in different contexts. In this paper, we use a large data set on the occupational intentions of more than 40,000 students from 15 countries and data from the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) project to explore how entrepreneurial intentions are transmitted within families in different cultures. In doing so, we make the following contributions to existing literature and research. First, we provide a more detailed picture of how family members influence children's intentions to become entrepreneurs (Dunn and Holtz-Eakin, 2000 and Sorensen, 2007) by showing that besides a direct influence of parents' entrepreneurial status on children, there is an additional – albeit small – effect arising from grandparents' entrepreneurial status. Our findings that parents' entrepreneurial status partly mediates grandparents' influence and that the influence of grandparents and parents can partly substitute for one another emphasizes the complexity of the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurial intentions. Second, our study is unique in examining cross-cultural variance in the transmission of entrepreneurial intentions within families. Our finding that this transmission is to some extent culture-dependent adds to the literature on cross-cultural entrepreneurship research (Hayton et al., 2002, Mueller and Thomas, 2001 and Stephan and Uhlaner, 2010). The literature explains variance in entrepreneurship across countries in terms of differences in the cultural values that are conducive or detrimental to developing entrepreneurship intentions. We provide an additional explanatory factor: differences in family structures and values and the subsequent transmission of entrepreneurial intentions from parents and/or grandparents to children. Finally, existing studies rarely acknowledge that the impact of entrepreneurial parents on offspring's entrepreneurial intentions may change from childhood to adolescence. One exception are Aldrich and Kim (2007) who theoretically argue that there are strong parental influences from genetics and parenting practices during childhood, moderate influences from work values during adolescence, and weak influences from financial support during adulthood. Surprisingly, and contrarily to Aldrich and Kim's arguments, we find that parents do not have a significant influence if they are only entrepreneurs during the offspring's childhood, but they do influence the offspring's intentions if they are entrepreneurs during adolescence. Although the effect during adolescence is weak, this finding indicates that the transmission of sophisticated business knowledge later in adolescence may be more crucial in forming offspring's entrepreneurial intentions than the transmission of values early in the offspring's life. However, continuous parental entrepreneurial activities (during the offspring's childhood and adolescence) have the strongest effect on offspring's entrepreneurial intentions, suggesting that parents' contribution to developing both their offspring's entrepreneurial values and knowledge is most influential. We structure this article as follows. First, we derive our theory and hypotheses. Second, we detail the research method and present the results. Finally, we discuss our findings, state the implications and the limitations of our study, and outline recommendations for future research.

In interpreting our results, some limitations of the study and the GUESSS data set should be taken into consideration. While GUESSS provides a unique opportunity to analyze a large data set covering more than 40,000 young individuals from various countries, we acknowledge some limitations of this data set. First, as mentioned above, we do not have information at the university level in terms of exactly how many students were invited to participate, which diminishes our ability to calculate exact response rates at the university or country level. In addition, the sampling procedure was not adequate to gain a sample representative of the countries surveyed, and it does not allow us to cover countries, universities, and students that did not agree to participate. Since we do not have information on the participating students' “readiness” to answer, we cannot address the issue of non-response biases. Second, as with all secondary data sets, there are some limitations to the measures that cannot be addressed, which we outlined above (e.g., measurement of entrepreneurial intentions). Further, our data set does not provide a distinction between the constructs of feasibility and desirability perceptions, which are basic to the formation of entrepreneurial intentions (Fitzsimmons and Douglas, 2011 and Krueger et al., 2000). Similarly, closely connected to feasibility perceptions is the construct of entrepreneurial self-efficacy—namely, people's belief that they can successfully found and run a business (Chen et al., 1998). Data sets that entail these variables can provide more detailed insight into which facets and elements contribute to the development of entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Third, even if a large sample size is often desirable, the very large sample size of our study necessitates care when interpreting the results. As the significance of effects depends on the sample size, in very large samples, even very small effects can reach conventional levels of significance. To provide additional information to the reader, we report the sizes of the effects found in terms of (Δ)pseudo R2. Effect sizes for our results were small to very small. However, our results are very robust across different specifications. Further, the development of entrepreneurial intentions is very complex and is influenced by a variety of different factors (Shane et al., 2003). For example, previous research has emphasized the impact of entrepreneurship classes on the formation of entrepreneurial intentions ( Peterman and Kennedy, 2003 and Souitaris et al., 2007), but this effect was also rather weak in our study—even weaker than the parents' effect. This indicates that more research is needed to better understand the different factors (and their interplay) influencing the development of young people's entrepreneurial intentions. Finally, the cross-sectional nature of our study offers only a snapshot of the situation. In order to fully understand the transmission of entrepreneurial intentions over people's life course, longitudinal studies are required, and future research could fill this gap. Second, student samples like in this study are often used in studies examining the formation of entrepreneurial intentions (e.g., Krueger et al., 2000) because students are on the verge of choosing a career and are at the typical age for starting up a new venture (Lévesque and Minniti, 2006). Nevertheless, the debate whether student samples are representative of “people in general” continues (Robinson et al., 1991). Future research should investigate non-student samples to test the generalizability of the results presented here (cf. Chen et al., 1998). To conclude, our study highlights that the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurial intentions within families is complex and involves more than one generation. Further, the impact of entrepreneurial parents and grandparents on offspring is not alike in all families and all nations; the influences are particularly strong in cultures with high in-group collectivism. Further, we find that the extent and timing of parents' entrepreneurial activities over the life course of their offspring matter and that entrepreneurial fathers and mothers have different effects on sons and daughters. We hope that our findings stimulate future research on the mechanisms underlying how entrepreneurial intentions are transmitted within families.