Drivers of entrepreneurial intentions in sustainable entrepreneurship

Abstract

Purpose The role of entrepreneurship has changed to include issues beyond economic growth. This has turned attention toward the drivers of entrepreneurial intentions across entrepreneurship types, particularly in sustainable entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to examine the drivers of entrepreneurial intentions in sustainable entrepreneurship. In particular, the paper aims to extend the existing intention models to include work values and attitudes toward sustainability, thereby bringing the model into the context of sustainable entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach Using a quantitative research design, data were collected in three European countries through anonymous questionnaires. The data consist of responses from 393 university students. Findings The results show that attitude toward sustainability and perceived entrepreneurial desirability enhance sustainability-oriented entrepreneurial intentions. Moreover, adding sustainability into the regression equation adds explanation power, hence suggesting that the theory of planned behavior needs to be adapted when applied to sustainable entrepreneurship. Attitudes toward sustainability are positively impacted by altruism, while perceived entrepreneurial desirability is driven by intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Research limitations/implications The study focuses on one particular type of entrepreneurship and one particular age group. Originality/value The paper contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by applying the entrepreneurial intention model to sustainable entrepreneurship. The results imply that it may be the time to consider the variance in entrepreneurial opportunities in intention models as well as the need to address the conflict between work values. The results show that sustainability-oriented entrepreneurial intentions are driven by attitudes toward sustainability and perceived entrepreneurial desirability. These two attitudes are driven by altruism and extrinsic rewards, and, especially, extrinsic reward plays an opposite role in both drivers of sustainability-oriented entrepreneurial intentions.

The Impact of Environmental Risk Exposure on the Determinants of Sustainable Entrepreneurship

“…In addition, control variables are included. First, we control for gender as women are found to have a more favorable evaluation of sustainability [27,46]. Furthermore, we controlled for gender, as current young social movements like Friday's for Future might indicate that young people are more concerned about the environment.…”

“…Previous studies have already confirmed that the three attitudinal antecedents are also capable of explaining the appearance of sustainable entrepreneurial intention [24][25][26][27][28]. Therefore, building on the TPB and a sample of 175,280 respondents, an intention-based framework is developed to empirically investigate the impact of environmental risk exposure on the formation of sustainable entrepreneurial intention.…”

Sustainable Entrepreneurial Process: From Idea Generation to Impact Measurement

“…Sustainability-oriented entrepreneurial intentions are driven by perceived entrepreneurial desirability and attitude toward sustainability [27]. Perrini et al [23] identified that sensitivity towards a social problem fosters idea generation.…”

“…Sustainable and social entrepreneurship differ from conventional entrepreneurship in terms of value creation and impact [27,35]. Over time, several forms of impact measurements have been proposed, however, impact in society is a social construction, involving different stakeholders, so it is not possible to establish a unique standard.…”

Sustainable Entrepreneurship Team Scale Development: A Complex Systems Perspective

“…Over the past decade, a vast amount of scholarly work has examined various aspects of sustainable entrepreneurship, including sustainable entrepreneurs' (SEs') intention and motivation [12][13][14][15][16], SEs' competency [17][18][19], SEs' values [20], SEs' knowledge [5,21], sustainable entrepreneurial opportunity [1,2,[22][23][24], the context for SE [9,[25][26][27][28], success factors for SE [29,30], ways to promote SE [31][32][33][34][35], etc. Although prior studies are insightful, they mainly focus on individual-and/or organization-level factors, albeit the fact that most startups are launched with a group of people [36].…”