Founder, Academic, or Employee? A Nuanced Study of Career Choice Intentions

Abstract

We add novel insights to the debate about why individuals choose to start their own firm by comparing entrepreneurial intentions to the intentions to work at a university as an academic and to be employed in a private firm. To model this more complex set of career choices, we examine novel multiplicative aspects of the theory of planned behavior () and test our hypotheses on survey data of 15,866 students from 13 European countries. Multinomial logistic regression analyses reveal how the different elements influence career preferences and demonstrate the moderating effects of perceived controllability and desirability.

Notes

1 Working at a university as an academic also represents a type of employment (in the public sector). For purposes of clarity and readability, however, we chose the term “academic intention” for this career path and the term “employment intention” for the career path as an employee in the private sector.

2 Fitzsimmons and Douglas (2011) summarize it succinctly on page 433: “Steel and Konig (2006) suggest that behavioral intentions models bear close similarity to expectancy‐valence models and that expectancy theory can be assimilated into the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) framework (Ajzen 1991).”

3 GUESSS (Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey) investigates students' career choice intentions across the globe. See http://www.guesssurvey.org. GUESSS data have been used by several studies recently (e.g., Laspita et al. 2012; Lima et al. 2015; Zellweger, Sieger, and Halter 2011).

4 Following a strict back‐translation procedure, the German and the French versions (with the aid of two bilingual native speakers who were not involved in the original survey development) were also prepared. No major differences between the back‐translated and the original versions were found. Some GUESSS country teams translated the English GUESSS survey into their own preferred language and were requested to apply the same strict back‐translation procedure. The translated versions were reviewed by the GUESSS core team and checked for categorical and functional equivalence.

5 Not all countries and universities started data collection at the same time. Starting dates were between March and May 2011, and closing dates between April and July 2011.

6 In most countries, students could win iPods, travel vouchers, or other items. GUESSS reports a response rate of 6.3 percent (Sieger, Fueglistaller, and Zellweger 2011). This compares favorably to previous GUESSS editions (Fueglistaller et al. 2009) and to other e‐mail student surveys (Porter and Whitcomb 2003). It is likely to be an underestimation, however, as not all universities necessarily invited all their students. Unfortunately, reliable estimates are not available for all universities.

7 We chose Greece due to its unique distribution of career choice intentions, with the share of intentional academics being highest (21.7 percent) and the share of intentional entrepreneurs being third lowest (30.8 percent).

8 We refrained to test for potential nonresponse bias by comparing early and late respondents (Oppenheim 1966). Due to the data collection procedure at GUESSS involving different starting and closing dates of countries and universities, it was impossible to identify early and late respondents in a reliable way.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Philipp Sieger

Philipp Sieger is Assistant Professor of Family Business at the Center for Family Business (CFB‐HSG), University of St. Gallen.

Erik Monsen

Erik Monsen is Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the School of Business Administration, University of Vermont.