Entrepreneurship is of fundamental importance for economic growth and well-being around the globe and is intensely promoted in developing countries with the intention to fight poverty and unemployment. Various entrepreneurship training programs have been implemented in the developing world within the last decades. These programs are attended by tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs each year. This dissertation introduces a promising alternative to these established training interventions: a training program that aims at increasing personal initiative. Personal initiative is a behavior that is suggested to be central for successful entrepreneurship. Empirically, personal initiative has been shown to be highly related to entrepreneurial success. Yet, the proposed causal relationship that PI leads to entrepreneurial success has not been systematically examined through an experimental design. This dissertation tests this causal relationship in a field experiment by means of the personal initiative training. If personal initiative is a central entrepreneurial variable, then our theoretically derived training intervention should increase personal initiative in entrepreneurs which in turn should lead to higher entrepreneurial success. This dissertation includes two studies. The first study (Chapter 2) reviews evaluation studies of entrepreneurship training programs that have been implemented in developing countries. This review enables us to compare our personal initiative training with established training programs. The second study (Chapter 3) describes and evaluates the personal initiative training. Chapter 2 summarizes the findings of 27 studies evaluating 10 different training programs in developing countries (including the personal initiative training and the evaluations study presented in Chapter 3). This makes this work the most extensive review of entrepreneurship training programs in the empirical literature (to our knowledge). The review indicated that all included entrepreneurship training programs positively affected entrepreneurial success.We evaluated our theoretically derived personal initiative training (Chapter 3) by means of a long-term field experimental study using a pretest/posttest design (4 measurement waves) with a randomized waiting control group. The sample consisted of 100 small business owners in Kampala, Uganda. As predicted, the theoretically derived training program increased personal initiative and business success (4 to 5 months after the training). These effects were sustained over a 12-month period posttraining. Testing for mediation revealed that the increase of personal initiative was responsible for the increase of success. These results confirmed the core causal proposition of personal initiative theory that personal initiative leads to business success. Thus, we suggest that PI is indeed a central entrepreneurial variable.
Verknüpfung zu Publikationen oder weiteren Datensätzen
