An Effect of a Entrepreneur's Desire for Achievement on the Founder's Personal Characteristics and Self-efficacy

Purpose: Although start-up is an economic activity that creates jobs, few studies focused on the relationships among the entrepreneur’s accomplishment desire, personal characteristics, and self-efficacy. Our research identified the impact of the entrepreneur’s desire to perform on his or her characteristics including personal capacity, entrepreneurship, social capital, gender, and entrepreneurial experience. In addition, this research focused on the effects of these characteristics on self-efficacy and highlighted whether the entrepreneur’s characteristics have a mediating effect. Research design, data, and methodology: According to prior research, we developed several hypotheses that are in line with the research purpose. To collect data, we sent a questionnaire to 130 small business owners in Jeollabuk-do, the Republic of Korea. Response sheets with missing values and poor answers were not used in our analysis. A total of 113 responses were used in our analysis. Next, a frequency analysis, reliability verification, validity test, and correlation analysis were conducted to examine whether data are valid to predict a model. Finally, a structural equation modeling technique was employed to empirically test the hypotheses. Results: The results of this research were as follows. First, the entrepreneur’s accomplishment desire has a positive effect on entrepreneurial characteristics and self-efficacy. Second, gender has an insignificant mediating effect. Third, an analysis of the entrepreneurial experience and mentor existence as a mediating effect variable showed that there is a difference in the impact of accomplishment desire on social capital. Conclusions: The implications of the results of this research were as follows. First, both government support programs that can foster business sustainability and step-by-step support services that can develop practical capabilities are more likely to be effective than are a temporary support policy in business stabilization. Second, the entrepreneur’s experience is a determinant of job creation and economic growth. Therefore, these results would provide directions for policy makers to develop education services for start-ups.