Aging Small Business Owner-managers and Business Exit: Longitudinal Investigation

Abstract

The context of this study is business exit decisions of aging small business owner-managers. Because of the intention-action gap that exists between the theoretical modeling and actual behavior, and the existence of multiple important goals (e.g. business exit, retirement), we do not fully grasp the social psychological mechanism underlying actual business exit among aging small business owner-managers. In our theorizing efforts, we argue that aging small business owner-managers' perceived control over a target behaviour (i.e. business exit), combined with higher levels of general self-efficacy, is likely to facilitate business exit intention turning into actual business exit. We collected empirical, longitudinal data among aging Finnish small business owner-managers to test a mediated moderated model. Our main empirical findings suggests that attitude-behavioural models (e.g. Theory of Planned behavior) can help us gain a deeper understanding of how intentions translate into actual behavior in situations with multiple important goals if they are coupled with more generic control beliefs, such as self-efficacy. This main finding has both theoretical and practical implications.