From Entrepreneurial Intentions to Entrepreneurial Behavior: The Role of Institutional Factors

Introduction

Entrepreneurship is considered to play a key role in economic growth, innovation, and employment (Urbano & Aparicio, 2016; Wennekers, van Stel, Thurik, & Reynolds, 2005). Such a role is conditioned by different external or environmental factors that encompass policies, regulations, and culture (Bjørnskov & Foss, 2016; Urbano, Aparicio, & Audretsch, 2019). Therefore, in the last three decades, some researchers have focused on studying the factors that might have an influence on the development of entrepreneurial activity (Ireland, Hitt, & Simon, 2003). This implies that entrepreneurship is seen as a process and not as an event (Shane, 2012). From this viewpoint, a significant amount of research has addressed the concept of entrepreneurial intentions (Kautonen, van Gelderen, & Fink, 2015), which are seen as a necessary precursor to performing entrepreneurial behaviors (Liñán & Chen, 2009).

Previous research has shown that situational and personality factors do not predict entrepreneurial activity consistently (Krueger, Reilly, & Carsrud, 2000); hence, the entrepreneurial intention approach has been used. In this regard, since the early 1990s, the number of studies that have applied intention models to explain the decision to start a new business has increased significantly (Liñán & Fayolle, 2015). The underlying idea in these studies is that it is better to predict any planned behavior by observing intentions towards that behavior than to focus on attitudes, beliefs, or demographic measures (Krueger et al., 2000). Overall, intentions have been considered extensively to be the single best predictor of behavior (Ajzen, 1991, 2001; Fishbein, & Ajzen, 1975).

Despite this extensive literature, there are some relevant research gaps. First, very few articles have analyzed the complete “antecedents–entrepreneurial intentions–entrepreneurial action” process empirically. Most researchers have studied this sequence partially (for an exception, see Kautonen et al., 2015). On the one hand, previous studies have examined the role of a wide variety of determinants in entrepreneurial intentions (Verheul et al., 2015). These studies have used different theoretical frameworks and models to explain entrepreneurial intentions, but no specific work has combined different models into a single one (Fayolle & Liñán, 2014). In this regard, Schlaegel and Koenig (2014, pp. 291) pointed out “there has been growing concern about the sometimes inconclusive empirical findings of the relationship between entrepreneurial intention and its determinants.”

Second, the study of the intention–behavior link has emerged recently (Gielnik et al., 2014; Goethner, Obschonka, Silbereisen, & Cantner, 2012). The findings have agreed that intentions are a predictor of subsequent action; however, the extent to which intentions can explain a variation in behavior is not clear (Kibler, Kautonen, & Fink, 2014; Van Gelderen, Kautonen, & Fink, 2015). For instance, while Ajzen et al. (2009) found an intention–behavior correlation of 0.90 to 0.96, other authors have reported a less intense relation: Armitage and Conner (2001) found a correlation of 0.47, and Kautonen et al. (2013, 2015) showed that the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) accounts for only 31–39% of the variation in startup behavior. Overall, the literature reviews focusing on the entrepreneurial intention area have agreed that most challenges lie in this specific intention–behavior stream of research (Fayolle & Liñán, 2014; Liñán & Fayolle, 2015; Shook, Priem, & McGee, 2003).