With this dissertation, I present a human resources approach to entrepreneurship through selection and training of small-business owners in developing countries. Entrepreneurship is an important source of employment, innovation, and general economic prosperity (Autio, 2005; Walter et al., 2005; Reynolds et al., 2005; Kuratko, 2003). In developing countries, job creation through business ownership is especially important because job opportunities are limited (Walter et al., 2005; Mead & Liedholm, 1998). Strengthening the small business sector is one of the best ways to reduce poverty and increase economic growth (Birch, 1987). Thus, this dissertation adds to the scientific literature in taking a human resources approach to entrepreneurship: selecting and training entrepreneurs. Selection has widely been researched on in various scientific fields like human resource management, industrial-, work-, and organizational psychology, but only partly focusing on selection of entrepreneurs. Regarding training, there exists a fair amount of studies that focus on entrepreneurship education, but a lot of them suffer from substantial heterogeneity and methodological flaws (Glaub & Frese (2011); McKenzie & Woodruff (2013)). The dissertation combines the ideas of using selection procedures for entrepreneurs with the idea of teaching entrepreneurial skills.
This dissertation deals with the investigation of success factors in the field of entrepreneurship, especially entrepreneurship training, from a psychological perspective. In particular, I argue that the identification of certain psychological aspects helps to better understand the underlying mechanisms for successful entrepreneurship trainings and thus, enables successful entrepreneurship. In the second chapter I theoretically examined planning as a fundamental action an entrepreneur hast to undertake in order to succeed. Scholars are in disagreement about the question if planning is crucial for the entrepreneurship. Thus, I provide a comprehensive overview of the advantages and disadvantages of planning in entrepreneurship from a psychological perspective. I explain negative aspects (e.g., lack of knowledge, difficulty to predict the future, and inflexibility) as well as positive aspects (e.g., legitimating, action-regulatory, and learning function) about planning in entrepreneurship. Furthermore, I develop a theoretical model that combines both the positive and negative aspects of planning in entrepreneurship. With this theoretical model, I integrate different types of planning (e.g., formal and informal plans) as well as positive and negative functions of planning (e.g., learning or stickiness, inflexibility) to provide a first approximation for a theory of entrepreneurial planning. In the third chapter, to focus on the field of entrepreneurial trainings, I empirically examine the under-researched field of the relation between trainer and trainee. I use the transformational leadership theory (Bass, 1985) and a theory of learning outcome (Kraiger, Ford, & Salas, 1993), to hypothesize that the trainers´ charisma has a positive effect on the trainees´ entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Additionally, I search for possible moderators for the hypothesized trainer-trainee-relationship in an explorative manner, using insight from different research areas (e.g., pedagogy, philosophy). To test the hypotheses, I conducted a 12-week entrepreneurship training by which I had 12 measurement waves across four classes with 161 students and 12 trainers, which lead to 919 observations. In the fourth chapter, to broaden the perspective on the mechanisms within entrepreneurship training, which lead to a successful outcome, I empirically examined the short- and long-term effects of entrepreneurship training on life satisfaction. To do so, I developed a theoretical model based on theories of life satisfaction, that explain the underlying mechanisms of the short- and long-term effects of the entrepreneurship training on life satisfaction. With this model I hypothesize, that entrepreneurship training has a positive short- effect on life satisfaction, which is mediated through entrepreneurial self-efficacy. I furthermore hypothesize, that the long-term effect of the entrepreneurship training is mediated through self-employment. The short term-effect acts like a boost and vanishes over time, whereas the long-term effect holds in the long run. To test these hypotheses, I conducted entrepreneurship training as part of a randomized controlled field experiment with five measurement waves over a total period of 2.5 years. Using discontinuous growth modeling to take into account the temporality of our hypothesized effects we statistically analyzed the 1,092 observations from 312 students. Chapter 5 concludes this dissertation with general discussion of the three chapters.
Sustainability transitions research proposes fundamental changes of societal systems´ organisation to overcome persistent societal challenges, such as climate change or biodiversity loss, and allowing systems to become more sustainable. This thesis adresses an underlying tension in sustainability transitions research: between transitions as an open-ended process of fundamental change and the normative direction of this change: sustainability. In doing so, three themes so far underexplored in sustainability transitions scholarship are in the focus of the research: individual agency, normativity and transdisciplinary collaboration. Thereby, the thesis aims to strengthen process-oriented and potentially transformative approaches to sustainability transition research, in contrast to primarily descriptive-analitical approaches. Transition management as a recent and salient example of transdisciplinary transition research is chosen to provide research framework and application context. Based on conceptual-theoretic, empirical case study and reflexive work, three main results are contributed: First, a psychologically enriched understanding of individual and sustainability related agency in conceptual and empirical understandings of transition management is developed. This builds on two perspectives: a psychologically enriched capability approach as well as the analysis of social effects (social learning, empowerment and social capital development) of transition management to capture sustainability oriented agency increases. As second main result, normative considerations, namely sustainability, are included into transition management on conceptual and empirical levels. Therein, substantive, procedural and intentional aspects of sustainability are combined: Substantive aspects are covered by proposing capabilities, behavioral freedoms to live a valuable life, as normative yardsticks to measure developments. Procedural aspects include a detailed understanding of facilitating a learning journey towards making sustainability meaningful in the local transition management cases and setting up experiments for its realiziation. Intentional aspects are addressed by linking social effects of transition management to awareness, motivations and feelings of responsibility towards sustainability. As a third main result, the transdisciplinary collaboration in transition management of creating an arena as an interactive learning space is conceptualized and explored, as well as the roles of the researchers therein. Key issues of this learning space, the community arena, are drawn out and ideal-type roles and activities of researchers in addressing these issues are proposed and empirically analysed. As synthesis of thesis results, ten principles of sustainability transition management are proposed.
