Entrepreneurial intention and career choices: The role of volition

Developing entrepreneurship among students and helping them to build their career plans and improving their employability is the core of public policy in a lot of countries in Europe (Branchet et al., 2011). Following some empirical researches (Boissin et al., 2009), we do know some predictive factors for the emergence of an entrepreneurial project. But another question remains largely unexplored: What are the psychological mechanisms that may interplay in entrepreneurial intention and career choices? Our research aims to demonstrate that entrepreneurship is an objective which relies entirely on willingness, and therefore, it is much more dependent on interpersonal features than on economic and environmental constraints. In particular, we wish to highlight the personal dynamics in shaping, maturing and implementing a choice of entrepreneurial career in order to extract volitional characteristics of this career choice. The hypotheses are tested using data from interviews conducted with French students in business schools, engineering schools and universities. Our dynamic approach to study the psychosocial processes involved in the definition of an entrepreneurial career helps understand the interest of young people in the entrepreneurial process. This research has demonstrated that volition has a key role in binding an individual commitment to an ambitious career objective.