The Impact Of College Student Entrepreneurs' Non-standard Employment Experience On Their Voice Behavior

Although the government introduced a number of supportive policies to promote entrepreneurship, the rate of successful startups by college students in our country is still very low. The limited entrepreneurial resources, lack of business sense and experiences are the congenital deficiency when college students start a business. As a bridge to connect school and society, the non-standard employment experience of college students could provide them practicing opportunities to understand business operations and management and help them get well prepared for entrepreneurship. Faced with an increasingly complex and dynamic market environment, college student founding team need team members not only work together to voice and brainstorm but also dare to question and change the status quo, actively put forward challenging voice to enhance the flexibility and adaptability of new ventures. According to the knowledge-based view and social capital theory, we conducted a questionnaire survey on 106 college student founding teams in Shanghai then analyzed the effect of college student entrepreneurs' non-standard employment experience on their voice behavior and challenging voice as well as the relevant mechanism and boundary conditions.The findings revealed that college student founding team members' non-standard employment experience have significant positive impact on their voice behavior. When they have conscientiousness personality and a high level of psychological safety, the positive relationship between college student founding team members' non-standard employment experience and voice behavior would be significantly strengthen. However, when they have neuroticism, extraversion, openness or agreeableness personality, the positive effect of college student founding team members' non-standard employment experience on their voice behavior didn't significantly strengthen. The non-standard employment experience of college student founding team members played a positive role in promoting their challenging voice, and the effect entirely worked through their perceived authority. However, the positive effect of college student entrepreneurs' non-standard employment on their perceived authority didn't significantly strengthen when reputation of the firm where they worked as non-standard employees was higher. This paper chose the non-standard employment experience of college student founding team members as a starting point, not only enriched the research context and perspective of voice behavior but also provide a theoretical support for guiding college students' entrepreneurial activities.