Research On The Relationship Between Regulatory Focus And Academic Entrepreneurial Intentions—From The Perspective Of Legitimacy

University academics are known as the main force on the frontier of technical innovation.It is critical to facilitate academics to engage in commercialization activities,which may improve the productivity and outputs of scientific achievements,thereby resolving the tough issues of university-industry collaboration.Despite the continuingly introduced policies by the government that encourage academic entrepreneurial activities,it is universal that academics in practice lack entrepreneurial motivations and their intentions of entrepreneurship are low.Empirical studies have implied that there is diversity in entrepreneurial commercialization,and the difference among university academics in their intentions of taking entrepreneurial action on or off the job is significant.Chronic regulatory focus theory(RFT)offers a new perspective for interpreting the formation of commercialization intentions in academics,as it is rooted in the motivational difference in individual self-regulation process.Regulatory focus theory posits that chronic regulatory focus which individuals adopt might change in accordance with stimulation of contextual factors.Previous literatures did not involve investigations about the mechanism of social contextual factors moderating entrepreneurial intentions in academics on the cognitive level.As to academics,it remains controversial about the legitimacy of academic entrepreneurship because of striking discrepancies and even conflicts in issues such as original motivation of actions and value propositions between conventional scientific and educational responsibilities and commercialization activities.With relative supports from governmental top-level design in academic entrepreneurship requesting further improvement,as well as divergence in attitudes and comments from both inside-organization media,experts and the public and outside-organization leaders and colleagues toward academic entrepreneurship,conflicts in multi-level legitimacy of academics starting commercialization are increasingly focused by theoretical and practical studies.Thus,the legitimacy in contexts inevitably shapes the commercialization intents of academics.This paper examines which effects different regulatory focuses might exert on the commercialization intents in academics and how does a key contextual factor,legitimacy,regulate the intents of academics from a cognitive perspective,which provides an innovative model for encouraging commercialization choices in university academics.First of all,drawing on considerable entrepreneurship literature,this study proposed a theoretical model containing regulatory focus,entrepreneurial intentions and legitimacy of entrepreneurship,with four groups of hypothesis following the model.Next,several well-developed scales were chosen in light of different variables in the model,and a survey of 386 academics in universities located in Jiangsu Province and Shanghai was conducted.Data analysis was performed with SPSS and AMOS statistic programs.Findings from the empirical study suggest that promotion focus had significantly positive influences on entrepreneurial intentions of academics both on and off the job,while prevention focus only had a significantly negative effect on the intentions off the job.Additionally,the social/inside-organization legitimacy of entrepreneurship exerted significantly positive moderation of the correlation between promotion focus and intentions off the job,and both legitimacy showed the same positive regulation in the correlation between prevention focus and intentions off the job.A positive moderation effect of the social/inside-organization legitimacy of entrepreneurship was also seen on the correlation between promotion focus and intentions on the job.Finally,based on above findings and from the perspective of the government,academic organizations and mass media,detailed strategies and proposals to promote the legitimacy of entrepreneurship and commercialization intents in academics were presented.