Exploration of active citizenship, entrepreneurial behaviour and calling in career

Exploration of active citizenship, entrepreneurial behaviour and calling in career

In light of the research gap in the entrepreneurship literature on the contextual variables and values impacting the entrepreneurial career decision-making, this thesis had been designed to combine - by means of rapprochement – threads of thought from three seemingly distinct disciplines: career development, entrepreneurial psychology and active citizenship.

In order to resolve the gap, the research presented ‘borrows’ from vocational psychology into the entrepreneurship enquiry in order to understand more about: 1) how entrepreneurship may help express different career orientations and personal goals and 2) the consequences of these orientations and goals for business behaviours and success. It also addresses the research into the contextual variables and values by introducing two concepts which are new to the domain: calling and active citizenship behaviour. Active citizenship can be regarded as a distal personal variable in the Social Cognitive Career Theory model and is comparable to the construct of social justice. This thesis is pioneer in its way of approaching and handling the construct of active citizenship behaviour in the SCCT model.

The research advances an integrative, theoretically-based conceptualization of flourishing as a perceived result or consequence of choosing the entrepreneurial path that is not only testable but also links the generated distal contextual variables such as calling and active citizenship behaviour constructs to rich conceptual accounts of self-efficacy, outcome expectations, interest and flourishing. It also extends the existing Social Cognitive Career Theory research and specifically its module on career decision-making by investigating, for the first time, the direct and indirect roles of calling and active citizenship behaviour.

The research method adopted a three-stage solution whereby conceptual models were developed from a simpler to a more sophisticated model, and were presented in three distinct Studies. Both the first and the second studies draw on archival databases (N1 = 197; N2 = 5677). In the third study, the proposed conceptual models were tested in a sequential design with a sample of graduate students (N = 336).

In Partial Least Square structural equation analyses focusing on predictive relationships between constructs, calling has been found to be a strong and significant predictor of entrepreneurial and career-decision self-efficacy, outcome expectation and furthermore, as demonstrated in the detailed analyses, it also predicts flourishing by the mediating means of outcome expectations. Active citizenship proved to be a significant and strong predictor of calling, outcome expectations and to a lesser extent, of vocational self-efficacy. It did predict entrepreneurial self-efficacy via the mediating role of vocational self-efficacy, as demonstrated in the decomposed model analyses.

Taken together, the studies constituting the present research have provided new perspectives and a great deal of data on the role and relevance of active citizenship behaviour and calling as new constructs in the extended SCCT career decision-making model.