Potencial empreendedor e intenção empreendedora: diferenças em função do gênero e relações entre os construtos

Abstract

Considered an important socioeconomic phenomenon, entrepreneurship, presented as an identification and exploration of business possibilities, combat the unemployment, income generation and economic growth. One of the facets of the phenomenon is female entrepreneurship that has developed a lot in recent years, slightly increasing female participation in the country's economy, moving the local economy, generating jobs and income. Therefore, the general objective of this paper is to verify if there are differences in entrepreneurial potential and entrepreneurial intention according to gender. The specific objective is to verify if entrepreneur potential is a predictor of entrepreneurial intention, and to investigate whether there are differences in entrepreneurial potential and entrepreneurial intention depending on the t ype of organization. For this study, a convenience sample of 185 participants was used, 120 women and 65 men. Among them, 124 worked in private organizations and 55 in public organizations, working in various roles. Measures with empirical validation were selected for each of the study variables, namely the Entrepreneurial Potential Scale, multifactorial and the Entrepreneurial Intention Scale, one-dimensional. The results of the study showed that there was a significant difference in entrepreneurial potential, according to gender, only for goals, with the average of women being higher. For the entrepreneurial intention variable the differences in gender function were not considered. The predictive power of entrepreneurial potential in relation to the entrepreneurial initiative was 40%, being a unique exclusive contribution of the economic dimensions (β = -0.18; p = 0.01), opportunity (β = 0.57; p = 0 .00) and network of relationships (β = 0.21; p = 0.01). Regarding the entrepreneurial potential according to the type of public or private organization, an analysis showed small differences only for the dimensions of control and persuasion. Concerning the entrepreneurial intention according to the type of organization, it appears that employees of private organizations have a greater intention to undertake. The results obtained may contribute to the conduct of new research, and serve as a warning to companies and managers about their incentive or discrimination practices towards entrepreneurs, as well as encouraging them to implement practices and policies that value entrepreneurship.