2.1 Parental role models and self-employment
Of the many potential role models that influence an individual’s social learning, parental role models are particularly relevant, since children are especially exposed to their parents’ behaviors. Demonstrating something to someone through one’s own choices in life has a very pragmatic influence, serving as an “orientation guide” and encouraging imitation (Schmitt-Rodermund and Vondracek
2002; Bandura
1986). Thus, the behavior that children observe and learn from their parents decisively affects their development. This kind of influence is rooted in sociological and psychological theories focusing on the socialization of children, including the within-family transmission of information, beliefs, and resources. These theories stress that social learning occurs within families as a means to assist children in adopting the social roles and behaviors that are necessary for them to participate in society (Brim
1968).
According to social learning theory, “of the numerous predictive cues that influence behavior at any given moment, none is more common or informative than the actions of others” (Bandura
1986, p. 206). By observing the behavior of others in their environments, individuals learn and acquire internal codes of behavior influencing their perceptions and actions. Learning from role models can lead individuals to initiate similar behaviors, strengthen or weaken their existing restraints against particular behaviors, or transmit new patterns of behavior. The stronger the effects of the role models on the observer, the more relevance and credibility these role models entail for the observer (Bandura
1986; Matthews and Moser
1996).
While the above arguments suggest that social learning theory is well suited to explain influences of parental role models on children’s behavior, it is important to note that it is not the purpose of this paper to rigorously test this theory. That is, we use it as a tool to understand how parental role models influence individuals’ career decisions, and this application of the theory is based on a number of assumptions. For example, we assume that children pay attention to their parents’ behaviors and experiences, particularly since attention toward environmental stimuli (such as role models) is a prerequisite to reaction to these stimuli (Rensink
2000). Furthermore, our arguments are in line with research acknowledging that parents play an active role in influencing their children’s behavior through both positive and negative feedback (Bandura
1986; Bandura and Walters
1963).
Research has demonstrated that parental work experiences have significant effects on children, and that children learn from their parents’ experiences by internalizing them as norms of behavior (Menaghan and Parcel
1995). Social learning from parental role models influences children’s later professional orientation (Bird
1993; Stavrou and Swiercz
1998; Korunka et al.
2003; Carr and Sequeira
2007), such as their potential interest to become entrepreneurs themselves (Birley
1989; Davidsson and Honig
2003; Wang and Wong
2004); for example, through early exposure to self-employment children receive an informal introduction to business methods from their parents, who transfer the knowledge they have acquired during their own self-employment experience (Dunn and Holtz-Eakin
2000; Mueller
2006).
Social learning while growing up in an entrepreneurial family can also lead children to develop certain values which are important antecedents of the decision to become self-employed; for example, work by Dunn and Holtz-Eakin (
2000) suggests that children in entrepreneurial families acquire the need and desire to strive for independence from their parents, resulting in an enhanced tendency towards entering self-employment (e.g., Shane et al.
2003). While these and other studies (Scott and Twomey
1988; De Witt and Van Winden
1989; Wang and Wong
2004; Schmitt-Rodermund
2004) provide support for parental role models generally encouraging family offspring to become self-employed, it appears that paternal role models and maternal role models influence this decision to a different extent. First, same-sector effects (i.e., that children choose the same educational specialization as parents) appear to be somewhat stronger for fathers and sons, while no such same-sex influence is confirmed for mothers and daughters (Russel et al.
2003), suggesting that paternal role models play a more significant role in their children’s occupational choice than do maternal role models. For example, in most Western countries, fathers are responsible for earning the living, are more career oriented, and are more interested in status attainment compared with mothers (Eddleston et al.
2006). Mothers (still) do have a choice between family and work: running the household and watching over the children, engaging in part-time employment (to add to the family’s resources), or selecting (self-)employment following their own interests (or opportunity or motivation) rather than the family’s need for further resources (Minniti et al.
2005). This suggests that offspring might experience their father’s self-employment as “more intense” than their mother’s, such that social learning is more strongly influenced by paternal than maternal role models. This argument is supported by Dunn and Holtz-Eakin (
2000), who found that sons of self-employed fathers more often enter self-employment than sons of self-employed mothers, and by Mancuso (
1974), who found that the “primary motivation for the entrepreneur’s high ego and need for achievement is based upon his relationship with the father” (cf. p. 20).
Summing up, social learning theory and existing literature suggest that there is an overall positive relationship between the presence of parental role models and an individual’s decision to become self-employed. However, this effect may be stronger for paternal than for maternal role models, leading to the following hypotheses:
H1a
In entrepreneurial families, there is a positive relationship between the presence of parental self-employed role models and offspring being self-employed.
H1b
In entrepreneurial families, there is a positive relationship between the presence of paternal self-employed role models and offspring being self-employed.
H1c
In entrepreneurial families, there is a positive relationship between the presence of maternal self-employed role models and offspring being self-employed.
H1d
In entrepreneurial families, the positive relationship between the presence of self-employed role models and offspring being self-employed is stronger for paternal self-employed role models than for maternal self-employed role models.
2.2 Parental role models, personality, and self-employment
While the above arguments and studies support the notion that, through social learning, parental role models influence the decisions of individuals to become self-employed, there appears to be variance in the extent of this influence. Findings in the literature are not uniformly in favor of a strong “parental role model” effect. Insignificant or inconsistent results are reported from studies in the USA (Brenner et al.
1991; Kim et al.
2006; Matthews and Moser
1996) and Singapore (Ghazali et al.
1995). It appears that the effect of parental role models on individual decisions to enter self-employment is not universal, but may be more complex than sometimes assumed.
One factor that may influence the relationship between role models and career decisions is the personality of the individuals. Personality refers to relatively enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions that can be quantitatively assessed and show some degree of cross-situational consistency (Pervin and John
1999). Personality determines, partly, how individuals sense (Holland
1985), interpret (Rauch and Frese
2000), and act on (Hunt and Adams
1998; Caprana and Cervone
2000) information and stimuli they receive from their environment and thus their social learning processes. For example, Ajzen’s review (
1987) and related work by Bagozzi et al. (
1992) note that individuals with an internal locus of control are not strongly influenced by social norms introduced to them by their family. These studies show the reduced effect of role models and social learning because of certain personality traits influencing information processing and learning.
Latest meta-analyses and reviews (Mueller
2004; Rauch and Frese
2007; Zhao and Seibert
2006) state the importance of considering an individual’s personality when examining self-employment decisions: “…entrepreneurship research cannot develop a consistent theory about entrepreneurship if it does not take personality variables into account as well” (Rauch and Frese
2007, p. 29). Since the presence and behaviors of parental role models represent environmental stimuli for individuals, their propensity to act based on these parental role models is contingent on their personality characteristics. In line with this argument, Kuratko and Hodgetts (
2001) stated that behavior can only be described by the interaction of personal and situational factors (such as the presence of role models), and others have also argued that a theory which does not consider these factors simultaneously overly reduces the complexity of the self-employment process (Korunka et al.
2003; Tett and Burnett
2003). It appears that personality and role models complement each other and
conjointly rather than independently influence self-employment decisions.
One of the most common classifications of personality relates to the “Big Five” (Costa and McCrae
1992). The Big Five refer to an individuals’ degree of neuroticism (anxious and self-conscious), conscientiousness (hard working and persisting), agreeableness (cooperative and altruistic), extraversion (cheerful and seeks excitement), and openness (receptivity to new experiences). In the entrepreneurship literature, various studies have investigated how the Big Five influence an individual’s decision to become self-employed. For example, a range of authors identified individuals intending to start their own business as being more emotionally stable and more open compared with others intending to become employed (Chen et al.
1998; Crant
1996; Simon et al.
1999; Singh and DeNoble
2003). Furthermore, the Big Five not only successfully distinguish individuals intending to become self-employed from those who do not but also help compare entrepreneurs with managers. Zhao and Seibert (
2006) found entrepreneurs to be more conscientious, open, and emotionally stable while being less agreeable than managers. The notion that the Big Five personality dimensions play an important role in an individual’s decision to become self-employed is further corroborated by recent reviews and meta-analyses (Mueller
2004; Rauch and Frese
2000,
2007; Zhao and Seibert
2006).
We limit our attention to openness because several empirical studies have consistently established that openness plays an important role in individuals’ self-employment decisions (Zhao and Seibert
2006; Engle et al.
1997; Singh and DeNoble
2003; Schmitt-Rodermund
2004). In contrast, the impact of other personality variables has not been established unambiguously, and their impact on self-employment decisions is questionable (Gartner
1988; Cooper and Gimeno-Gascon
1992; Rauch and Frese
2007; Baum et al.
2007).
It appears that the effect of social learning varies between high- and low-openness individuals, because openness influences the kind of information and environmental stimuli to which individuals respond. Individuals with high openness will respond more to behaviors and actions of people other than their parents. Family contexts represent highly familiar environments, and high openness can complement the presence of parental role models; that is, we focus on the moderating effect of openness on the role model–self-employment relationship.
By definition, openness is the tendency to be creative, original, and receptive to new experiences (Singh and DeNoble
2003). Open individuals have broad interests, are imaginative, and enjoy the esthetics of their environment (Zhao and Seibert
2006); that is, open individuals are responsive to new ideas and incorporate information and stimuli outside their daily experiences and established patterns of thoughts into their behavior and actions. In contrast, individuals with low openness are conventional and comfortable with well-established methods and topics (Singh and DeNoble
2003); they favor the status quo. Therefore, the more open the individual, the more likely she/he is to learn from others outside familiar contexts.
Applied to entrepreneurial families, it appears that, through social learning experiences outside the family, more open offspring may incorporate ideas about potential career paths different from those of their parents—career paths that they would not have considered when attending only (or mainly) to the family context (Stavrou and Swiercz
1998). Moreover, the more open the individual, the higher their creativity (Singh and DeNoble
2003) and tendency to experiment with behavioral patterns different from those of their parents (Stavrou and Swiercz
1998). These individuals are less likely to be influenced by family members and parental role models; instead, they may come up with a variety of potential career opportunities that are new and unknown to them and their family (Stavrou and Swiercz
1998). Given that they find one of these opportunities attractive to pursue, open individuals might not follow their parental role models’ footsteps but choose a career that no one in their family and social environment has taken before.
In contrast, low-openness individuals tend to focus their attention on what they know, such as their parents’ daily observed behavior. They attend to little environmental stimuli and information from outside their familiar context and are often reluctant to integrate those stimuli into their mental models and career decisions. Therefore, low-openness individuals will have a narrower imagination and be less creativity in their career choice than high-openness individuals and thus may be more likely to choose a career similar to those of their family members. That is, if these individuals live in an entrepreneurial family, they will likely stay close to what they know (Singh and DeNoble
2003), following the career path of their parents and becoming self-employed.
Finally, the effect of openness on the parental role model–self-employment relationship may be different for paternal and maternal role models because children generally learn gender roles (shared beliefs about what role behaviors are appropriate for each sex) and gender stereotypes (shared beliefs about what psychological traits are appropriate for each sex) from their social environment (Deaux and Kite
1993; Eddleston et al.
2006; Konrad et al.
2000), which in turn influences their decision policies in later life (Ruble and Martin
1998).
In entrepreneurial families, an orientation toward entrepreneurship and self-employment is characterized by proactiveness, aggressiveness, and autonomy (Lumpkin and Dess
1996)—attributes that are typically associated with masculinity and the role behavior of fathers (cf. Bem
1974). Therefore the motivating effect of paternal role models is likely to be stronger for less open individuals because their father being an entrepreneur is consistent with their existing belief of gender roles and stereotypes;
1 that is, self-employment of mothers will appear less consistent with what children expect based on their learned gender roles and stereotypes than self-employment of fathers.
In contrast, the more open that offspring are to new influences that contradict their existing beliefs (Singh and DeNoble
2003), the more likely they are to accept inconsistencies between self-employed mothers and learned female gender roles and stereotypes, and thus the more motivated they may be to follow nontraditional maternal role models when choosing their occupation; for example, if a society mainly defines women through roles connected to family and household responsibilities, female entrepreneurship is implicitly interpreted as less desirable (Bruin et al.
2007).
In sum, we hypothesize that individuals with high openness are less influenced by role models within an entrepreneurial family than individuals with low openness, and that this effect is different for maternal and for paternal role models:
H2a
In entrepreneurial families, the positive relationship between the presence of parental self-employed role models and offspring being self-employed is stronger for individuals with low openness than for individuals with high openness.
H2b
In entrepreneurial families, the positive relationship between the presence of paternal self-employed role models and offspring being self-employed is stronger for individuals with low openness than for individuals with high openness.
H2c
In entrepreneurial families, the positive relationship between the presence of maternal self-employed role models and offspring being self-employed is stronger for individuals with high openness than for individuals with low openness.