The Impact of Entrepreneurial Temperament and Social Capital on Entrepreneurial Intention before Start-up

Abstract

Purpose – This study aimed to investigate the effect of entrepreneurial temperament (ET) such as innovativeness, risk-taking, and proactiveness in entrepreneur’s lifetime before start-up and the effect of social capital (SC) such as network ties and trustworthiness on entrepreneurial intention. Research design, data, and methodology - We examined the components of ET (innovativeness, risk-taking, and proactiveness) and components of SC (network ties and trustworthiness) through existing prior research and investigated the factors that affected entrepreneurial intention. The first hypothesis of this study was that entrepreneurial temperament will have a significant impact on network ties of social capital, and the second hypothesis assumed that entrepreneurial temperament will have a significant effect on the trustworthiness of social capital. Finally, the second hypothesis assumed that social capital will have a significant impact on entrepreneurial intentions. We collected 175 data using questionnaires for people who have not yet started a start-up. And we used the Structure Equation Modeling (SEM) to evaluate the collected data and to test the research model by the two step research procedure. Results – As a result, the innovativeness and proactiveness of ET have a significant effect on network ties and trustworthiness of SC, but the effect of risk-taking on risk-taking of SC is not significant. On the other hand, network ties and network ties of SC was revealed a significant effect on the EI. Conclusions - The implications of this article could be observed as mentioned in this paper. First, we found that entrepreneurial innovativeness and proactiveness are helpful in constructing SCs, but not risk-taking. These results demonstrated that ET of entrepreneurs is important factor in the formation of social capital. Second, the SC that an entrepreneur built before the start-up has a meaning for EI. In conclusion, ET was affected partially to EI mediated SC. It is academic in that ET and SC are independent from each other and have a mediating role between ET and EI, unlike those directly affecting EI. Although some important implications were found in this study, this study had some limitations and we hope that future research will be complemented.