“Jack-of-all-trades” with passion: Keener to pursue startup in a team?

ABSTRACT

This study tests the thesis of the “jack-of-all-trades” – whether individuals with a variety of skills are more likely to pursue entrepreneurship – at the early stage of venture formation. We also investigate if entrepreneurial passion would heighten the effect of a variety of skills to make would-be entrepreneurs keener to pursue the startup process and form new venture teams. Taking advantage of a 10-month entrepreneurship training project, we tested our propositions with a longitudinal sample of 215 participating waged employees. The findings show that skill variety positively influenced participants to form teams for new venturing in the program, and such effect was stronger among passionate individuals. Implications of the findings for human capital theory and entrepreneurial practice are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Human capital
• entrepreneurial passion
• team formation
• entrepreneurial education

Notes

¹ The average team size of this study was 3.0, which is in line with that observed in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor study (Dowejko & Au, 2017a) in Hong Kong (average founding team size = 2.9, t-test = 0.702, n.s.).

² It correlates with subsequent evaluations from judges (r = .89, p < .001) and team’s advancement (r = .90, p < .001) in this program.

³ Harrison and Klein (2007) distinguished organizational diversity as variety, separation, and disparity. We went through their 10 guidelines and eventually chose their recommended Teachman’s Index, not those measuring separation (standard deviation) and disparity (Gini Index). The variable covers a full range of diversity in our sample (0 to 1.10).

⁴ http://dschool.stanford.edu/our-point-of-view/, accessed on April 14, 2015. We recognize this differentiation is context based and discuss this further in the Discussion section.

⁵ Business expertise category includes business management, presentation skills, social networking, marketing, and fundraising; technology expertise category includes coding, hardware (or software) development, and data mining; and design expertise category includes creative thinking, product design, and user experience focus.

⁶ Our measurements, though in a different setting, happen to exhibit similar means and SDs comparing to Cardon et al., 2013), which are (founding: 4.13 and .60 versus 4.29 and .65) and (developing: 4.11 and .64 versus 4.03 and .73), respectively.

⁷ McNally, Martin, Honig, Bergmann, and Piperopoulos (2016) tested and validated a mini-Kolvereid scale, which could be a better choice to capture the attitude of self-employment. Future studies should consider using this scale instead.

Additional information

Funding

This study is partially supported by research grants from the Hong Kong RGC (GRF 12501317) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71702085).