从个人价值观到创业意愿:创造力作为中介变量

From Personal Values to Entrepreneurial Intention:Creativity as a Mediator

创业是一个非常热门的社会话题。不管是解决下岗工人就业问题,还是大学生就业问题,政府都在积极鼓励创业。但是在任何一个国家,适合创业的人都可能是少数。因为一个人能否成为创业者,与某些先天的特质(如性格和智力类型)或者早期社会化过程(如价值观)有关。本研究重点关注个人价值观如何影响创业意愿,以及影响创业意愿的可能的中介变量(本研究重点关注创造力)。基于Schwartz的个人价值观体系,使用来自17个省市自治区的46所大学的样本(n=2715)的研究发现,保守价值观(安全、遵从、传统)与创业意愿之间呈负相关,而开放价值观(自我导向、刺激、低享乐主义)和自我提高价值观(权力和成就)与创业意愿之间呈正相关。在多元回归方程中,当控制了创造力的影响作用以后,个人价值观对创业意愿的解释效度显著降低,因此,创造力是个人价值观影响创业意愿的一个部分中介变量。研究结果具有如下政策含义:首先,创业教育和培训或许可以在短时间内提高一个人对创业过程的理性认识,改善和提高某些创业技能,如社会技能和财务管理的技能,但是否能改变一个人的价值观、是否能提高创业意愿,促使更多的人走上创业的道路,需要谨慎对待。其次,大力培养年轻人的创造力是"中国制造"转向"中国创造"的关键,因为个人价值观对创造力影响巨大,而创造力对创业意愿也同样影响巨大,同时世界经济也正在从以知识为基础的活动,转向以创造力、创新、想象力和创业为基础的活动。如果能建立某种公平的筛选制度,在考虑到包括个人价值观和创造力等一些个人因素以后,可以将更多的社会资源向某些个体进行适当地倾斜,这也许可以在比较短的时间内提高整个社会的创业活动的质量和创新水平。当然,这种筛选机制不能以牺牲程序公平为前提。

Entrepreneurial intention is defined as the possibility for people to be involved in the creation of new venture activities in the future. Psychology literature shows that intention is the best predictor of planned behaviors, particularly when that behavior is rare, hard to observe, or involves unpredictable time lags. Entrepreneurship is a typical example of such planned,intentional behavior. To date,previous studies per se have largely ignored the importance of personal values and the mechanism by which personal values influence entrepreneurial intention. Meanwhile, although creativity is a concept, which should be closely related to entrepreneurship in nature,these two research lines have basically been isolated from each other in the past. In this study we have integrated the literature from of personal values, creativity and entrepreneurial intention, and proposed a partial mediation model to explain how personal values influence entrepreneurial intention via creativity,where we employed Schwartz＇s Personal Values System Theory （1992）as the basic framework of personal values and as well the creativity scale developed by Zhou ~ George （2001） to measure daily creativity behavior. In addition,we constructed one in- dex of three items to measure entrepreneurial intention by following the suggestion of Douglas and Shepherd （2002）. To ob- tain an exemplary sample, we gathered 2715 freshmen students from 46 universities in 17 provinces, big cities and autono- mous districts in China. We followed the method of Baron and Kenny （1986） to test mediation effect. The results show that conservation value,which is made up of security, conformity and tradition, is negatively related to entrepreneurial intention; openness to change value, which includes self-direction, stimulation and lower hedonism, is positively related to entrepreneur- ial intention. Meanwhile, self-enhancement value, which is made up of achievement and power, is positively related to entre- preneurial intention as well, but self-transcendence value, which includes universalism and benevolence, is not. Moreover, in the hierarchical regression analysis,in particular after we entered 12 control variables in the first step and partialized creativi- ty in the second step, the explained variance of personal values in predicting entrepreneurial intention decreased significantly （74 ~ reduction）, but was still significant. Therefore,creativity is a partial mediator in the relationship between personal val- ues and entrepreneurial intention. Although there are some limitations to this study, such as same sources bias and same method bias,it constitutes a contribution to the literature and practice on this subject in several ways. First, this is one of the few studies that explore the relationship between personal values, creativity and entrepreneurial intention, where the last two are basically driven by the first,which functions well on the last via the second. Furthermore,the study reminds us that it is impossible to train all people as entrepreneurs ,because personal values and creativity basically develop before adulthood;and what can be done, however,is to select the right people with greater openness to change values,higher self-enhancement values and higher creativity, and invest more heavily in them, if, in doing so, we do not violate procedural rights.