Title: Young employees' job-autonomy promoting intention to become entrepreneur: embedded in gender and traditional versus modern culture

Authors: Chuqing Zhang; Thomas Schøtt

Addresses: Department of Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Strategy, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China ' Department of Entrepreneurship and Relationship Management, University of Southern Denmark, Kolding, Denmark

Abstract: Entrepreneurs in their own business typically enjoy freedom to decide on their work. Employees tend to have much less autonomy in their jobs. Conceivably, employees who lack job-autonomy may be motivated to seek autonomy and become entrepreneurs. Conversely, employees who have some job-autonomy may develop competencies and interest in becoming entrepreneurs. These two opposite arguments leads to ascertaining how young employees' job-autonomy discourages or encourages a vocational intention to become entrepreneur, and how such coupling is embedded in gender and culture. The sample is young employees in many countries, surveyed in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Culture is measured in the World Values Survey. These two-level data reveal that job-autonomy promotes intention to become entrepreneur, especially for men. This gendering of the coupling between job-autonomy and entrepreneurial intention prevails in the world as a whole. Culture moderates effects, in that job-autonomous and female employees are more likely to become entrepreneurs in traditional culture than in modern culture. The findings enhance understanding of attraction to entrepreneurial careers, and especially attraction from employment to self-employment, and understanding the embeddedness of attraction in gender and culture.

Keywords: young employees; job autonomy; entrepreneurial intention; gender; traditionality; modernity; youth entrepreneurs; entrepreneurship; traditional culture; modern culture; self-employment.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESB.2017.081974

International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 2017 Vol.30 No.3, pp.357 - 373

Received: 12 Oct 2015
Accepted: 16 Jan 2016
Published online: 31 Jan 2017 *

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