The influence of sustainability orientation on entrepreneurial intentions — Investigating the role of business experience

Abstract

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c tDo individuals who are concerned by issues of sustainability also exhibit stronger entrepreneurial intentions? Given that existing imperfections in the market create numerous opportunities for entrepreneurship connected with sustainable development, adding individual sustainability orientation to models of entrepreneurial intention could increase their explanatory power. Based on survey data collected from engineering and business students and alumni of three universities, we provide evidence that entering sustainability orientation into the equation is actually meaningful. However, our findings suggest that the positive impact of sustainability orientation vanishes with business experience. Consequently, we suggest measures to nourish an evidently existing potential for sustainable entrepreneurship.The emerging stream of academic literature on sustainable entrepreneurship adds a new dimension to the general promise of entrepreneurship. No longer is entrepreneurship supposed to merely result in economic success: sustainable entrepreneurs manage to the "triple bottom line" by balancing economic health, social equity and environmental resilience through their entrepreneurial behavior. Sustainable entrepreneurship is thus clearly associated with the promise of more traditional concepts of entrepreneurship, but also brings additional potential both for society and the environment.With this paper we contribute to the emergent stream of literature on this important topic in one particular aspect. Above all, we are interested in individuals who are concerned with environmental and societal issues; individuals who are sustainabilityoriented and thus could potentially be more interested in supporting initiatives and forming businesses that support the idea of sustainability. In other words, we aim to answer the question of how sustainability orientation and entrepreneurial intentions are related in practice. Our paper, as a relatively rare exception uses large-scale survey data to provide empirical insights into this question. In doing so, and by being rooted in entrepreneurship theory and theorizing on sustainable development, it links debates on entrepreneurship for sustainable development with mainstream theories of entrepreneurship and at the same time provides a balance to the wealth of conceptual models on sustainable entrepreneurship.Embedding our empirical analysis in entrepreneurship theory, we hypothesize a positive relationship between an individual's sustainability orientation and entrepreneurial intention. However, based on the literature on organizational legitimacy and empirical findings from research on business ethics, we hypothesize as well that business experience negatively impacts on this relationship. Based on data collected from students and alumni from science and engineering programs plus students from business programs at three universities, we apply ordinal probit models and find support for these hypotheses. Our ordinal probit models suggest that engineering...

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“…Although there is no established measure of perceived barriers to start-up, similar items have been used in earlier research (Edelman and Yli-Renko 2010;Thurik 2005, 2008), such as when they are related the perceived barriers to entrepreneurial intentions (Shinnar et al 2012;Kuckertz and Wagner 2010).…”

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