A social milieu perspective of parental influence on adolescents’ entrepreneurial and employment intentions

What is it about?

Employed parents influence their adolescents to be entrepreneurs! The choice of occupational type by adolescents depends on their parent’s occupational type and socioeconomic status in conjunction with the adolescent’s gender, academic performance, and cognitions relating to entrepreneurial self-efficacy, (ESE) psychological capital, and hubris. Entrepreneur parents provide guidance, role models, and vicarious learning opportunities for their adolescents to build entrepreneurial skills, but entrepreneurial intention also requires high perceived desirability of entrepreneurship. Adolescents with entrepreneur parents may witness too closely the hard work, stress, and financial instability of their parents’ business, and prefer employment instead. On the other hand, adolescents with employed parents likely incompletely understand entrepreneurship. We find that working-class and middle-class employed parents, and low academic performance, are strongly associated with the formation of adolescents’ entrepreneurial intention. We also find that ESE, psychological capital, and hubris interact synergistically to cause entrepreneurial intention, while hubris and academic performance are mutually suppressive determinants of entrepreneurial intention. The main implications of this study are that entrepreneurial education in schools will enhance both new venture development and the employment of adolescents by firms that value their entrepreneurial attitudes and skills.

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Why is it important?

This paper makes three main contributions to the entrepreneurial intention literature, First, we proceed beyond the simple observation (or not) of parent entrepreneurs to add a sociological dimension to the adolescent’s parents and enrich our understanding of the mechanisms of parental influence on their offsprings’ occupational intention. We find that having a parent entrepreneur (by itself) is not a significant determinant of ENT-intent (sample wide) nor at the case level with high consistency. We find that highly educated and more-wealthy (“middle-class”) employed parents effectively substitute for less-educated and lower-income (“working-class”) employed parents in having a positive effect on their adolescent’s ENT-intent (and inversely on EMP-intent). Indeed, we find that middle-class employed parents are a substitute for working-class employed parents with approximately twice the coverage in the high ENT-intent model. In addition, parents with higher monthly incomes seem to contribute positively to higher ESE, and thereby to higher ENT-intent, sample wide, perhaps because adolescents expect that their middle-class employed parents have the financial ability to assist financially. Second, we extend the literature on the impact of psychological positivity (PsyCap) on ENT-intent. Whereas Salavou et al. (2023) effectively treated PsyCap as an alternative to ESE with a direct impact on ENT-intent, we found that when considered alongside ESE, PsyCap is a core (or alternative-core) condition for ENT-intent (and inversely EMP-intent) in case-level configurations, and that PsyCap, ESE, hubris, and perhaps agenticism are likely to substitute for and/or synergize with each other. We found at the case level that ESE and PsyCap are not highly correlated but operate synergistically with each other to cause high ENT-intent (or low EMP-intent) and that both high PsyCap and high ESE are core conditions for high ENT-intent at the case level. Measuring different cognitions compared to entrepreneurial self-confidence, and developed in a pre-adolescent stage of life, PsyCap substantially strengthens ESE in explaining the formation of ENT-intent in adolescents (who at that stage of life may not have great awareness of what tasks are involved in entrepreneurship). Third, modelling EMP-intent as potentially dependent on either high or low ESE and using fsQCA to examine the antecedents of ENT-intent, allowed recognition of equifinal combinations of causal conditions that culminate in high ENT-intent or alternatively high EMP-intent. This method also provided empirical data to suggest that alongside the core conditions for these outcomes, the peripheral conditions can be regarded as alternative-core conditions which serve (in the presence or absence of each other) to cause the focal outcome, due to synergy, substitution, or suppression effects of causal factors operating in conjunction. We demonstrated that ESE, PsyCap, and hubris are synergistic and substitutive alternative-core conditions for ENT-intent and inversely for EMP-intent. Similarly, low academic performance is a core condition for high ENT-intent, while high academic performance is an alternative core condition for high EMP-intent. While hubris has previously been associated mainly with younger males (e.g., Hayward et al., 2006), we have demonstrated that hubris is a core condition for high ESE in both male and female adolescent pathways to high ENT-intent, and conversely is largely absent for both sexes in pathways to high EMP-intent. Moreover, our data implies that, on the whole, these adolescents are apparently not overly observant of, or encumbered by, societal gender role expectations.