La intención emprendedoraun estudio transcultural entre República Dominicana y España

Laburpena

Entrepreneurial activity has been seen as a driver of a nation's long-term economic growth (Romer, 1994). Entrepreneurship is a determining factor in overcoming a situation of deep crisis in which most of the economies have been involved. Competition, market, needs, dynamization of the economy and new technologies have forced people to innovate by creating companies and new ideas which contribute to the economic and intellectual growth of society (Pes and Bilbeny, 2012). Therefore, the study of entrepreneurship has been approached throughout different perspectives, but most of the work has been focused on the psychological process that leads a person to make decisions, take risks and create new ventures (Liñán and Chen 2009; (Schlaegel et al., 2014, Santos et al., 2016). This research analyzes the entrepreneurial intention from a cognitive and cultural perspective, in a sample of university students from the Dominican Republic and Spain. The Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior (1991) and Hofstede's the cultural dimensions have been followed as theoretical framework of this study. The main purpose of this study is to analyze the entrepreneurial intention and it's antecedents, in two different cultural contexts, in order to verify if the entrepreneurial intention and its antecedents differ between countries by the influence of the cultural dimensions. The Questionnaire of Entrepreneurial Intention made by Liñán et al. (2011) was used to collect the data. The sample size was 913 total, (428) Dominican and (485) Spanish students. In the empirical analysis, logistic regressions were performed on the total sample and in each one of the sample studied. After the empirical analysis, the results show: There is a positive relationship between the personal attitude and entrepreneurial intentions in both samples. In addition, according to the results, this is the most significant antecedent in Dominican Republic and Spain. The results of this study do not confirm the positive relationship between the subjective norms and entrepreneurial intention in the samples studied. This study confirms that the perceived behavioral control is the second antecedent that has a positive and direct effect on the entrepreneurial intention in both countries. Also the empirical analysis shows that in Dominican Republic the effects of the antecedents were stronger than in Spain. Therefore, and given that the cultural characteristics of each country are different, it can be concluded that in countries culturally similar to the Dominican Republic, with high power distance, high collectivism, high masculinity and low uncertainty avoidance the effect of the personal attitude and the perceived behavioral control on the entrepreneurial intention will be stronger. In this research we study the effect of the gender, family background, work experience, age and entrepreneurial education on entrepreneurial intentions. The only one that is relevant in both countries is the family background. Although the influence of this variable is stronger in the Dominican Republic, which could be due to the fact that it is a collectivist country, and therefore the people pay more attention to the opinions and experience of others before making a decision. On the other hand, Spain is an individualistic country, and the society is independent so they make their own decision without caring what people think. To sum up, the results support most of our hypotheses what lead us to confirm that Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior explains the entrepreneurial intentions among university students in the Dominican Republic and Spain. Also, the results support most of the hypotheses and we can conclude that the antecedents of the entrepreneurial intention proposed by Ajzen, explain the entrepreneurial intention among university students of Dominican Republic and Spain. In addition, this study confirms that the cultural dimensions of Hofstede have an important influence on entrepreneurial intention and its antecedents.