SIMD 2) MIMD

Using personality traits as a factor for measuring the impact of study or work abroad on entrepreneurial behaviour is contentious as, according to Robinson et al. (1991a) the problem is not so much that there is a lack of psychological characteristics that separate entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs, but rather there is a lack of consistent and developed theories and models used to identify such characteristics, implying that the research methods into psychological and personality traits are still flawed. Okhomina (2010) speaks of the personality approach to entrepreneurship as being both unsatisfactory and questionable when explaining entrepreneurial behaviour and performance and concludes that any attempt to use personality as the sole criteria for definition is over-simplistic. His study uses entrepreneurs and thus is based on actual entrepreneurial behaviour, unlike many of the studies reviewed so far, which tend to concentrate on entrepreneurial intent, but the upshot is the same – that whether we are considering actual entrepreneurs or potential entrepreneurs, using a personality approach to explain this is contentious. Chen et al. (1998) argue that the…

“…traditional personality approach to the psychology of the entrepreneur experiences a dilemma in that an individual characteristic has to, on the one hand, transcend specific situations in order to be a stable trait and, on the other hand, be unique to the domain of entrepreneurship” (p312).

As previously discussed, there appears to be a number of personality traits which are common in entrepreneurs and also agreement on the constancy of personality traits - evidence from the literature would tend to suggest that these are stable over time (Robinson

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et al., 1991; Ajzen, 1988). If we accept that personality traits are stable, then using these to measure the impact of study or work abroad on entrepreneurial development would not lead to any conclusions on how students had been affected by the mobility experience; the traits would either exist or not exist, or be present to some degree or another, and that situation would not be influenced by any environmental change or by a displacement event nor influenced by the passage of time. Caird (1991) also criticises trait approaches to measuring entrepreneurial tendency as being simplistic because they ignore the influence of external events on entrepreneurial behaviour.

If, therefore, using either personality or demographic / societal influences leads to inconclusive findings, what other options exist in order to assess the impact of a particular experience on entrepreneurial propensity? Krueger et al. (2002) stated that personal and situational variables could have an impact on entrepreneurship through influencing an individual’s key attitudes and general motivation to act, so perhaps entrepreneurial attitude is a more reliable measure of entrepreneurial propensity.

Entrepreneurial attitude is alluded to at length in the literature. Athayde (2009), using the social psychology definition of attitude as a predisposition towards a particular object, including abstract constructs, states that:

“The concept of ‘attitude’ is more dynamic than that of ‘trait’ as attitudes are responsive to external objects and are capable of change” (p482).

According to Florin et al. (2007) attitudes can change and can be influenced through education and in an environment that promotes and fosters entrepreneurial activity. They are ‘learned dispositions’ and, as such, can also be ‘unlearned’ or changed. Similarly, Phan et al. (2002) posits that students who are introduced to the concept of entrepreneurship at an early stage can develop positive attitudes towards starting a business and being entrepreneurial. Robinson et al. (1991) also viewed attitudes as being less stable than personality traits; they can change over time and across situations (i.e. they are influenced by the environment). This view is supported by Ajzen (1991), who describes attitudes as being more ‘malleable’ than personality traits. He states that unfolding events and new information about an issue can affect how we evaluate the issue, whereas personality traits are much more resistant to change. The inference, once again, is that a particular experience, such as study or work abroad, could influence the attitudes that students have towards being entrepreneurial now or later in life.

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Furthermore, attitudes are multidimensional in the sense that they are made up of three components: a cognitive component, an emotional (affective) component and a conative (behavioural) component and these can be verbal and non-verbal. The cognitive component consists of the beliefs and thoughts someone has about an object (e.g. “I believe that smoking is bad for me), the emotional or affective component is the feelings and emotions one expresses about an object (“I feel relaxed when I smoke”) and conative or behavioural components are how someone (re)acts to the object (“I smoke / do not smoke”). Attitude is thus a combination of these three components - a tripartite model consisting of feelings, thoughts and the intention to behave in a certain way - and, according to Florin et al. (2007), it can be better understood when all three components are considered simultaneously.

Therefore, we can consider using an attitude approach to investigate the impact of mobility on entrepreneurship. Using a measurement scale, such as Likert, to evaluate attitude is a common way to obtain information from respondents, particularly as attitude is inaccessible to direct observation and must be deduced from measurable responses (Ajzen, 1988). In order to understand how attitude measurement can be used for this research, we need to be familiar with Ajzen’s work on attitude in his Theory of Planned Behaviour.