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Entrepreneurial Intentions, Risk-Taking Propensity and Environmental Support: The Italian Experience

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The Anatomy of Entrepreneurial Decisions

Part of the book series: Contributions to Management Science ((MANAGEMENT SC.))

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is recognised as a powerful engine for employment and wealth for nations, to the point that, at the European level, institutions are, to date, particularly active in finding ways to stimulate young people’s entrepreneurial skills. In line with this, this chapter aims at analysing the entrepreneurial intention (EI) of students, testing the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) introduced by Ajzen in 1988 and expanding it by adding two ‘new’ variables, i.e. risk-taking propensity and perceived environmental support. In doing so, a questionnaire has been developed and the answers from a final sample of 383 Italian undergraduate students have been analysed.

Results support the entrepreneurial intention model: most hypotheses have been supported, and the explained variance is notably high. These results are interesting both for academics and policy-makers, pointing out the pivotal role of the environment to develop and foster the attitude towards entrepreneurship among students.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Weighted average: 1 = highly insufficient, 9 = highly sufficient.

  2. 2.

    In particular, the outer loadings express the absolute contribution of each item to its assigned construct with their standardised value being higher than 0.7. The second indicator for the valuation of convergent validity of the measures is the average variance extracted (AVE), which is the degree to which a latent construct explains the variance of its items; here, the suggested threshold is 0.5. For the internal consistency, we report the composite reliability (CR) and the Cronbach’s alpha, whose values should be between 0.6 and 0.9 (a value of 0.7 is generally accepted). Lastly, to assess whether each construct is genuinely distinct from the others, we followed two approaches: the Fornell-Larcker criterion, which verifies that the square root of each construct’s AVE is higher than its correlations with all the remaining constructs, and the Heterotrait-monotrait ratio (HTMT), which is indeed an estimation of what the actual correlation between two constructs would be, if they were perfectly reliable (its value should be lower than 0.9).

  3. 3.

    Bootstrapping is a resampling technique used to compute standard errors of coefficients and assess their significance without relying on distributional assumptions (i.e. multi-normality of data). Here 5000 sub-samples are calculated.

  4. 4.

    A shared rule is that the VIF should be lower than 5 (or 10 if a more liberal approach is adopted).

  5. 5.

    For the variable AGE, a group was created following a dichotomous categorisation of students born before 1997 or from this year forth. For the statistical comparison, each subsample was balanced with its counterpart by using a weighting vector.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management and Law, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy

    Francesco Scafarto, Sara Poggesi & Michela Mari

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  1. Francesco Scafarto
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  2. Sara Poggesi
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  3. Michela Mari
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Correspondence to Francesco Scafarto .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. International Business School, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

    Andrea Caputo

  2. Management and Law Department, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy

    Massimiliano M. Pellegrini

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Scafarto, F., Poggesi, S., Mari, M. (2019). Entrepreneurial Intentions, Risk-Taking Propensity and Environmental Support: The Italian Experience. In: Caputo, A., Pellegrini, M.M. (eds) The Anatomy of Entrepreneurial Decisions. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19685-1_10

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