What is it about?
Growing up with entrepreneurial parents does not automatically make a teenager want to become an entrepreneur. This study examined how entrepreneurial ambitions may pass from one generation to the next using matched responses from 57 Greek high-school adolescents and the parent they consulted about career choices. In every participating family, both parents were business owners. We considered how often parents and adolescents discussed careers, how closely their needs, interests and attitudes matched, and both their birth sex and broader gender-role characteristics. The analysis identified many different routes to high and low entrepreneurial intention. Frequent parent-adolescent discussion appeared in almost every high-intention pathway, while career similarity varied considerably. Both same-sex and different-sex parent-adolescent pairings appeared in routes linked to entrepreneurial ambition. Parental role modelling therefore works through combinations of family interaction, career fit and gender.
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Why is it important?
Entrepreneurship policies and educational programmes often assume that exposure to entrepreneurial parents naturally encourages children to follow the same path. Our findings show that parental occupation alone is not enough. Instead, the influence of entrepreneurial parents depends on how family conversations about careers combine with the adolescent’s and parent’s needs, interests, attitudes and gender characteristics. Frequent discussion was more consistently present than complete career agreement in pathways to high entrepreneurial intention. This suggests that parents do not need to share every career preference with their children, but they do need to engage with them. Schools and policy makers should therefore involve families in early entrepreneurship programmes, expose adolescents to diverse male and female role models and avoid presenting entrepreneurship through narrow gender stereotypes.
Perspectives
We began this study because most research on entrepreneurial intention focuses on university students and treats parental influence as a simple yes-or-no question: was a parent an entrepreneur? We wanted to look earlier, during adolescence, and examine what actually happens within the parent-child relationship. The configurational results confirmed that there is no standard recipe. Sons and daughters reached high entrepreneurial intention through different combinations involving mothers or fathers, different gender-role orientations, varying forms of career agreement and, in almost all cases, frequent career discussion. The study also showed that role models do not have to share the adolescent’s birth sex to be relevant. For us, the central message is that entrepreneurial role modelling is an interactive family process, not a simple occupational inheritance.
Dr. Xenia J. Mamakou
Athens University of Economics and Business
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A social milieu perspective of parental influence on adolescents’ entrepreneurial and employment intentions, Small Business Economics, December 2024, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s11187-024-00982-4.
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