感知创业阻碍对创业行为倾向的影响——创业教育的调节作用

2015年以来，我国创业活跃度整体呈显著下滑趋势，影响国家经济高质量发展。基于SSO框架，构建感知创业阻碍对创业行为倾向的作用机制模型，揭示我国创业活跃度不高的原因，探讨创业教育对该机制的调节作用，从降低感知创业阻碍对创业行为倾向不良影响视角明确创业教育实施效果。采用259份创客问卷调研数据对研究模型进行实证检验，结果发现：在感知创业阻碍的3个维度中，感知失去金融资源对失败恐惧的正向影响最强，感知失去社会支持次之，感知失去市场需求对失败恐惧的正向影响不显著；失败恐惧对个体创业行为倾向具有直接阻碍作用；创业教育明显削弱了感知失去金融资源、感知失去社会支持对失败恐惧的正向影响，并降低了失败恐惧对创业行为倾向的阻碍作用。

Research on the Impact of Perceived Entrepreneurial Obstacles on Entrepreneurial Behavior Tendency：the Moderating Effect of Entrepreneurship Education

Entrepreneurship activities can stimulate innovation vitality and effectively promote economic growth and industrial transformation. However, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report shows that the total early-stage entrepreneurship activity (TEA) of China has shown a significant decline since 2015. Especially, China’s 2019 TEA index was only 8.7 which was far below the efficiency-driven countries’ TEA such as Brazil (23.3). Thus, exploring the reasons for the decline of entrepreneurial activity and analyzing effective methods to solve this problem have become a hot issue in the entrepreneurial study.#br#Theoretically, having high level of entrepreneurial intention is the prerequisite for individuals to take entrepreneurial behavior. In fact, entrepreneurial intention is composed of entrepreneurial conviction and entrepreneurial behavior tendency. Some studies point out that entrepreneurial behavior tendency is a more reliable predictor of personal entrepreneurial behavior. However, existing studies mostly use entrepreneurial conviction to predict individual entrepreneurial behavior instead of entrepreneurial behavior tendency. In addition, there is a growing body of literature that concerns the positive inducing factors of individual entrepreneurial intention, far too little attention has been paid to the hindering factors on entrepreneurial behavior tendency, failing to explain why Chinese entrepreneurial activities have fallen into a downturn. Lastly, entrepreneurship education can help individuals overcome hindering factors including entrepreneurship obstacles at the macro-environmental level and fear of failure at the individual level. However, there are few studies on whether entrepreneurship education can reduce the adverse effect of these inhibitive factors on individual entrepreneurship, which can not provide the systematically understanding of the implementation effect of entrepreneurship education. Thus, this study aims to (1) explore the influencing mechanism of perceived entrepreneurial obstacles and fear of failure on individual entrepreneurial behavior, with the purpose of revealing the reasons for the low entrepreneurial activity in China; (2) and examine the moderating role of entrepreneurial education in this mechanism, clarifying its implementation effect from the perspective of reducing the decisive impact of perceived entrepreneurial obstacles on entrepreneurial behavior tendency, so as to provide reference for the government to effectively resolve the macro and individual entrepreneurial obstacles faced by individuals and promote the entrepreneurial activity of China ultimately.#br#The first question this study tries to address is why Chinese entrepreneurial activity has fallen into the recession. With this regard, a research model which investigates the effect of perceived entrepreneurial obstacles including perceived loss of financial resources, perceived loss of market demand and perceived loss of social support on entrepreneurial behavior tendency through fear of failure is developed based on SSO framework. A questionnaire is designed and data is collected form 259 Chinese makers who are achieving their innovative ideas in makerspaces. The reason why this study takes makers as the research object is that makers can incubate their own ideas with the help of the shared resources provided by the makerspace, and then turn innovative ideas into substantive products. During the creative incubation process, the maker group carries out a series of activities under the leadership of innovation consciousness, such as forming a project team with like-minded makers, participating in relevant technical training, developing and testing new products, etc. After the creative incubation stage, the entrepreneurial awareness of the makers gradually takes the leading position and guides them to commercialize projects with good market value. Therefore, the makers not only has the characteristics of significant entrepreneurial behavior tendency, but also can effectively activate the entrepreneurial activity. Hence, it is reasonable to select the makers as the research object in this study. Structural equation modeling is then adopted to analyze the data. The results indicate that among the three aspects of perceived entrepreneurial obstacles, perceived loss of financial resources has the strongest impact on fear of failure, followed by perceived loss of social support. However, the effect of perceived loss of market demand on fear of failure is not significant. Fear of failure has a direct negative impact on entrepreneurial behavior tendency.#br#The second question this study tries to address is that whether entrepreneurship education can reduce the adverse effect of perceived entrepreneurial obstacles on entrepreneurial behavior tendency. In this sense, the sample is divided into two sub-sample groups that one group has received entrepreneurship education and the other has not. The implementation effect of entrepreneurship education is clarified by comparing the differences in the influencing mechanism of perceived entrepreneurial obstacles on entrepreneurial behavior tendency between these two sub-samples. The empirical results show that compared with the group without entrepreneurship education, the perceived loss of financial resources and perceived social support of the group with entrepreneurship education has a smaller positive impact on the fear of failure, and the negative impact of the fear of failure on the entrepreneurial behavior tendency is also weaker. This results indicates that entrepreneurship education plays a significant moderating role in the influence mechanism of perceived entrepreneurial obstacles on entrepreneurial behavioral tendency, that is, entrepreneurship education can weaken the positive impact of key entrepreneurial obstacles (perceived loss of financial resources and perceived loss of social support) on fear of failure, and reduce the negative impact of fear of failure on entrepreneurial behavioral tendency.#br#In sum, this paper contributes the existing entrepreneurship literature in two ways. First, this study analyzes the influencing mechanism of perceived entrepreneurial obstacles on individual entrepreneurial behavioral tendency through fear of failure. Existing research on entrepreneurial intention mostly use entrepreneurial conviction to represent entrepreneurial intention, and focuses on analyzing the impact of positive inducing factors on individual entrepreneurial intention, which cannot fully explain the phenomenon that entrepreneurial activity has fallen into a slump in China. Therefore, this study takes entrepreneurial behavior tendency as a reliable predictor of individual entrepreneurial behavior, and constructs a research model to empirically analyze the effect of perceived entrepreneurial obstacles and fear of failure on entrepreneurial behavior tendency, thereby further enriching the research on the influencing factors of individual entrepreneurial decision-making. Second, this study clarifies the effect of entrepreneurship education from the perspective of reducing the adverse effects of entrepreneurial obstacles on individual entrepreneurial behavior tendency. The current empirical research on entrepreneurship education in China focuses on the cultivation of positive psychology of individuals through entrepreneurship education, which may lead to one-sided research conclusions. This study, therefore, empirically analyzes the moderating role of entrepreneurship education in the influencing mechanism of perceived entrepreneurial obstacles on entrepreneurial behavior tendency, and finds that entrepreneurial education can weaken the adverse effect of entrepreneurial obstacles and fear of failure on individual entrepreneurial behavior tendency. This conclusion provide a new perspective for empirical research on the effect of entrepreneurship education. #br#In addition, this study also provides suggestions for local governments and related departments on how to improve entrepreneurial activity, including improving the entrepreneurial environment to reduce entrepreneurial obstacles, taking corresponding measures to reduce the negative impact of entrepreneurial failure on potential entrepreneurs, and implementing entrepreneurship education to improve the ability and confidence of potential entrepreneurs to deal with entrepreneurial obstacles.#br#