Effects of national culture on entrepreneurial intentions

Abstract

National culture plays a pivotal role in shaping the behavior of individuals in all spheres of life. This behavior also guides individuals towards opting between doing job or starting a personal business. Little work has been done so far to examine the effects of national culture on entrepreneurial intentions of citizens in the same country. This study fills this gap by examining the effects of Hofstede (1984) national culture's dimensions on entrepreneurial intentions of individual's for the case of Pakistan. The culture dimensions included; power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, collectivism, long/short term orientation. The data has been collected from employees working in various organizations of Pakistan. Structural equation modeling technique has been adopted to analyze the data and to interpret the results. The study found that cultural dimensions including; higher power distance, collectivism, masculinity and short term orientation are having negative effects on organizational performance for the case of Pakistan. The study has discussed the important implications of national culture's dimensions to improve the organizational performance.