Factors That Influence The Entrepreneurial Interest Of Accountancy, Business And Management In A Private Senior High School
Introduction
On the 15 years’ professional background in university courses in the various academic areas strongly presented that there are changes influenced among other reasons wherein by the alternative of entrepreneurship for the future professionals. Several courses of the areas of applied social science such as Accountancy, Business and Management have begun to include at least one discipline directly related to entrepreneurship, although the word entrepreneurship has an extensive use referring to managerial and professional innovative and visionary activity. Entrepreneurship seemed an interesting option for these courses, since it could enable students to combine theoretical knowledge forming professionals that are being oriented beyond the culture of employment. It is assumed that meeting the skills requirements, despite its relevance to the success of a business has limited potential for the construction of entrepreneurial interest of the students to be future professionals. Aspects such as national environment family influence among others are examples of factors that influence the entrepreneurial interest of the future professionals. Upon these possibilities, it was set up as topics of analysis for this study the perceived vocation of the entrepreneurship courses, the social support of family and friends and the mastery of entrepreneurial requirements. Accordingly, the following central question was defined. Answering how do these factors greatly influence the entrepreneurial interest of students in Senior high school.
Since students are the future professionals, the proposition of this study is initially related to them as we decided to focus specifically on students of Accountancy, Business and Management 12. The main reason for this choice is that these course are very oriented to entrepreneurship. The main objectives of the research are to analyze, in the context of the courses considering some selected factors such as perceived vocation, support and mastery and its influence for the student’s entrepreneurial interests. Other objectives were to understand the specific influence of each of the selected factors on the student’s entrepreneurial skill, and to affect the variations of these factors considering some of the categorical information about students.
Scope and Delimitation
The purpose of this study is to analyze the entrepreneurial interest of Grade 12 Senior high school students in Accountancy, Business and Management related courses. A literature review is performed from which there are four factors affirming that the students interest in entrepreneurial interest is influenced by the perceived vocation of the area, the perceived social support from friends and family, the entrepreneurial skills mastery and ownership of a company. Entrepreneurial skills affect the propensity of individuals to become an entrepreneurs and the like hood of their success. Entrepreneurial skills are essential for the formation, survival and growth of a business. Saint Mary’s University is the field of our study and our respondents would be the Grade 12 senior high school students of Accountancy, Business and Management. The starting day when second semester open up marks the beginning of our research.
Statement of the Problem
This study aims to determine the factors that affect entrepreneurial interest of Grade 12 Accountancy, Business and Management students of the Saint Mary’s University a private highschool.
Conceptual literature
Entrepreneurship is the process by which individual pursue opportunities regardless to the resources they currently control. Fred Wilson stated that entrepreneurship is the art of turning ideas into a business. Entrepreneurship originated from French word “Entrepreneur”. Entrepreneurs are also known as self-employed people. There is no fix definition for entrepreneurs since people from different field of study perceived and defined it differently. An economist defines an entrepreneur as the one who makes the combination of resources to make them valuable. While to a psychologist, entrepreneur is typically driven by certain forces such as needs to obtain or attain something, to experiment and to accomplish targeted goal. To businessmen, an entrepreneur may be a threat, an aggressive competitor but may also be an ally, a source of supply, a customer, or someone who creates wealth for others as well as finds better ways to utilize resources, reduce waste, and provide jobs to others.
Some people believed entrepreneurs are born, not made. However, this myth is busted since many studies done in the past have reached a consensus where entrepreneurs can be made and are not genetically inherited. Everyone has the potential to become entrepreneur especially for those who have undergone educational process in universities. According to Kr. Baruah, being a successful entrepreneur is not easy. Long term, systematic planning and business expertise is needed such as developing business model, putting together a new venture team, raising money, establishing partnerships, managing finances, leading and motivating employees. Individuals should be very careful in determining own self as it helps them to make the right decision in choosing the right path for getting involved to be self-employed. Hence, identify entrepreneurial intention for a person before becoming entrepreneur is important, this may give a person a clear goal about what he want to be and what to do in accomplishing his goals and lead to succeed. Entrepreneurial Intention According to Ajzen (2009), intention is the immediate antecedent of behavior. He claimed that behavior is not performed mindlessly but follows reasonably and consistently from the behavior-relevant information and behavior reinforced by rewarding events and weakened by pushing events.
Individuals would like to be self-employed as they perceive that entrepreneurship is a suitable career path for them and is a way for them to accomplish their personal goals, pursue own ideas and realize financial rewards. Entrepreneurial intention defined as willingness of individuals to perform entrepreneurial behavior, to engage in entrepreneurial action, to be self-employed, or to establish new business. It usually involves inner guts, ambition and the feeling to stand on one’s feet. An individual may have potential to be entrepreneur but not make any transition into entrepreneurship unless they have such intentions. Birds (2007) proposed that entrepreneurial intention refers to individuals‟ states of mind that aimed at creating new venture, developing new business concept or creating new value within existing firms. It is an important factor in facilitating towards new venture establishment and has significant impact on the firms‟ venture success, survival and growth. He suggested that intentional process often begins based on an entrepreneur’s personal needs, values, wants, habits and beliefs. Scholars empirically evidenced that entrepreneurial intention is a valid predictor for entrepreneurial behavior as entrepreneurial actions always fall into the category of intentional behavior. Studying on entrepreneurial intention provides valuable insights for researcher to understand entrepreneurial process and predict entrepreneurial activities in better way through identifying antecedents of entrepreneurial intention.
Findings of Kolvereid and Isaksen (2006) on 297 business founders by using longitudinal data revealed that intentions to be self-employed did actually determine later entry into self-employment. Related Studies Usually, individuals do not start a business as reflex, they do it intentionally rather than engage it accidentally. According to Krueger, intention serves as mediating factor between entrepreneurial action and potential exogenous influence (traits, demographics, skills, social, cultural and financial support). They suggested that entrepreneurial intention helps in explaining the reasons on why certain individuals tend to start own business before opportunity scan or deciding type of business to involve in. They stated that entrepreneurs themselves should benefit from a better understanding of their own motives, intention affords them a chance to understand what factors drive them to make their decisions to pursue entrepreneurial career and how the venture becomes reality.
Some scholars proposed that entrepreneurship education should be included in entrepreneurial intention model. This is because entrepreneurship educational and training programs lead to the changes of individuals in their attitude towards entrepreneurship, their self-efficacy level which increase they control beliefs that they are capable in managing entrepreneurial career, and change their perceptions towards entrepreneurship, thus, affect their entrepreneurial intention.
Personality trait is becoming popular as an explanation of entrepreneurial behaviors and intentions. Personality trait is described as constructs to explain regularities in people’s behaviour. Contemporary theorist identifies five fundamental personality dimensions which are extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience. Traits predicting behaviour include risk taking, achievement motivation and locus of control. The concept of locus of control refers to a generalized belief that a person can or cannot control his or her own destiny. Those who ascribe control of events to themselves are identified as having an internal locus and those who attribute control to outside forces are categorized as having external locus of control. Gifford (2003), in a study theorizes that the influence of locus of control on perceptual alertness is the potential ability to see opportunities in the environment and explains the influence of locus of control on entrepreneurs. He concluded a person who has internal locus of control has greater amounts of perceptual alertness which leads to spontaneous learning. Curiosity has also been identified as a major motivator of behaviour in domains such as educational, occupational and recreational areas. A study conducted by Kashdan and Roberts (2004) found that highly curious individuals are more motivated to explore new environments to obtain diverse cognitive, perceptual, or sensational information to satisfy their curiosity. An entrepreneur is a person who creates new business by taking risks and uncertainties in order to gain some benefits and growth in business by identifying the opportunities and combining different resources required to establish the new business. Brockhaus (1980) identified that risk to tolerance or ambiguity tolerance does not affect entrepreneurs differently. However, Ghosh and Block (1993) identified that risk and ambiguity have distinguished effects on entrepreneurial behaviour. High creativity in running enterprise is a need for an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur should be ready to keep thinking and finding new opportunity in coping with problems and expanding the enterprise. Scott (1999) conducted a study on 36 entrepreneurial start-ups addressing specifically to the role of creativity in business start-ups. This study summarized case findings of these thirty-six start-ups and determined that where the fits are strong novelty generating components of creativity. Study by Riyanti (2007) found that an entrepreneur’s creativity generally leads to creative innovations.
The study by Autio, Keeley, Klofsten, & Ulfstedt, (1997) that investigated entrepreneurial intention of university students in various cultural contexts indicated that the encouragement from university environment affects the entrepreneurial confidence of university students. Educational support through professional education in universities is an efficient way of obtaining necessary knowledge about entrepreneurship. This is supported by the study done by Wang and Wong (2004) who pointed out that entrepreneurial dreams of many students are hindered by inadequate preparation of the academic institution. The school and education system also play a critical role in identifying and shaping entrepreneurial traits.
Other studies have pointed out that entrepreneurship education, especially education that provides technological training, is crucial to enhance entrepreneurs’ innovation skills in an increasingly challenging environment.
Subjective Norms
Azjen (1975) describes subjective norm as “perceived social pressure to engage or not to engage in behaviour”. Subjective norm and social norm has been used interchangeably and is social pressure from the opinions of individuals’ parents, friends, partners or other important role. Alsos et al. , (2006) study of 252 secondary school students in Nordland in Norway highlights subjective norms affect entrepreneurial intentions. However, Linan et al. , (2005), shows that the findings from Spanish two universities prove otherwise. Therefore, in this study, we include subjective norm as predictor and hypothesize that: H4: There is a positive relationship between subjective norms and entrepreneurial intentions of students to start a business.
Synthesis or Relevance
In this study, entrepreneurial intentions of students were analyzed from a process-based approach and since the perceptions of students on their current context are highly significant to understand their entrepreneurial intention. This study finds a new approach to gain a comprehensive picture of entrepreneurship intention. Behavior is not easily predicted by attitudes toward the act alone or by outside factors. The research decide not to focus on only one single direction, but equally examine three all internal human capital, external environment and intention based model to predict and compare their impact on student’s intention to become business founders in the future. Many studies have been conducted in the field of entrepreneurship research regarding various dimensions of the entrepreneurs and the business processes. However, there is a comparatively less amount of studies relevant to the effect of entrepreneurial skills on micro-entrepreneurial success in India, specifically in Jhakarta. Various studies on skill-related drivers of entrepreneurs are quite limited. There is a general agreement that skills have an influential role on the growth of entrepreneurship of a state.
