Entrepreneurial Intentions Of Foreign Employees In Beijing:Moderating Role Of Cross-Cultural Adjustment And Institutional Environment

Entrepreneurship plays an important role in the economic development of nations.Taking into account that entrepreneurship is a clearly intentional process,researchers from various disciplines want to find predictors of the intention to start business.Entrepreneurial intention has been regarded as a main element in understanding of a new business formation process.Previous research has been mainly focused on the role of personal traits,socio-demographic characteristics,education,background.However,far too little attention has been paid to the relationship between socio-economic environment and would-be entrepreneur.Considering that environment is one of the key elements in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intention influenced by environmental events.Indeed,environment can assist or inhibit entrepreneurial intentions in a society.In this research,the relationship between institutional environment,crosscultural adjustment and entrepreneurial intentions of foreign employees in Beijing were examined.The aim of this study was to present empirical support of the influence of environment and adjustment on the relationships among antecedents of entrepreneurial intention and intention to create a new firm,provide support to the relevance of the theory of planned behavior,fill in urgent non-student gap in entrepreneurial intention literature.Obtained results from the sample(N=223)revealed personal attitude and perceived behavior control to be positively related to entrepreneurial intentions.Cross-cultural adjustment was found to be a negative moderator of the perceived behavior control – entrepreneurial intention relationship.Institutional environment was identified as a negative moderator of personal attitude –entrepreneurial intention and perceived behavior control – entrepreneurial intention relationships.Current dissertation reveals new and meaningful insights that apparently may enlarge the body ofknowledge in entrepreneurship research,fills the gap on critical topic of entrepreneurship environment and adjustment,confirms the applicability of Ajzen's TPB model to foreign employees in Beijing,contributes to the entrepreneurship literature and literature on career research,identifies patterns in the relationship of variables,including entrepreneurial intention,its three antecedents,cross-cultural adjustment and institutional environment.Previous studies considered external factors to predict entrepreneurial intention.Current study contributes to the literature by implementing external factors like cross-cultural adjustment and institutional environment as moderating variables of the relationship between three antecedents proposed by Ajzen(1991)and entrepreneurial intention.The results of the study suggest that TPB model can be applied in the contexts of foreign environment and adjustment to that environment.However,negative moderating effects of those external factors show the need of improvement of the model and the need for further tests of TPB model in different cultural environment and with various samples.Governments and policy makers need to pay a great attention in introducing entrepreneurship related laws and designing entrepreneurship programs.Results show that opposite to common sense,in this case,individuals with high levels of cross-cultural adjustment and perception of institutional environment have lower entrepreneurial intention.