Abstract

Purpose – Despite the merit of extant studies on career decision regrets, they are not well integrated, are

developed at different speeds and differ in focus. Specifically, they do not address an important question about

the levels and antecedents of regret arising from choosing entrepreneurship instead of paid employment and

vice versa. The authors adopted the regret regulation theory as foundation to examining the moderated effect

of entrepreneurial potential (EP) on career choice regret (CCR) among employees and entrepreneurs.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors surveyed 721 employees and 724 entrepreneurs from a

developing country and applied partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to test the hypotheses.

Findings – Employees regretted their career choice three times more when compared with entrepreneurs.

However, the authors failed to conclude that the latter had three times better living conditions when compared

with the former. EP negatively influenced the regret of being an entrepreneur in lieu of an employee while it

positively influenced the regret of being an employee in lieu of an entrepreneur. The perceived opportunity cost

of being a higher EP employee was three times greater when compared with that of being a lower EP

entrepreneur. The effect of EP on CCR was mitigated or amplified by duration in the career, former career

status, decision justifiability, and perceived environment’s supportiveness.

Research limitations/implications – The design was cross-sectional, thus, the findings cannot be

interpreted in the strict sense of causality.

Originality/value – The authors rely on an important yet often overlooked context of the choice between

entrepreneurship and paid employment to test, clarify, and extend the regret regulation theory. The findings

have novel human resource management and entrepreneurship policy implications.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial potential, Career choice regret, Regret regulation theory.

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Purpose

As good as existing measurements of entrepreneurial potential (EP) may appear in the literature, they are fragmented, suffer from the lack of theory integration and clarity, are inadequately specified and assessed and the dimensions are unordered by importance. These limitations of EP metrics have hindered entrepreneurial practice and theory advancement. There is a risk of atomistic evolution of the topic among “siloed” scholars and room for repetitions without real progress. The purpose of this paper was to take stock of existing measurements from which the authors developed a new instrument that is brief and inclusive.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors followed several steps to develop and validate the new instrument, including construct domain name specification, literature review, structured interviews with entrepreneurs, face validation by experts, semantic validation and statistical validation after two waves of data collected on employee and entrepreneur samples.

Findings

A clear operational definition of EP is proposed and serves as a starting point towards a unified EP theory. The new EP instrument is made up of 34 items classified into seven dimensions, which in order of importance are proactive innovativeness, management skill, calculated risk-taking, social skill, financial literacy, entrepreneurial competencies prone to cognitive and heuristic biases and bricolage. The authors provide evidence for reliability and validity of the new instrument.

Research limitations/implications

Although a model is not the model, the authors discuss several ways in which the new measurement model can be used by different stakeholders to promote entrepreneurship.

Originality/value

The authors discuss the domain representativeness of the new scale and argue that the literature can meaningfully benefit from a non-fuzzy approach to what makes the EP of an individual. By developing a new EP instrument, the authors set an important pre-condition for advancing entrepreneurial theory and practice.

Keywords:Entrepreneurial potential, Entrepreneurial behaviours, Entrepreneurial competencies, New scale development, Psychometric properties, Entrepreneurialism

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ABSTRACT

We examine when employees consider becoming entrepreneurs and vice versa out of career choice regret. We collected data on 724 entrepreneurs and 721 employees and applied PLS-SEM to test a new conceptual model made of simple and double moderating effects. We report that individuals consider reversing career choices to manage regrets when: (1) the foregone career is accessible and resistance to change does not prevail; (2) it is not yet too late to do so; (3) they never tried the forgone option or, mistakenly or strategically, gave up on it; (4) the decision can benefit from genuine social support and approval of referent individuals; and (5) can advance valued active goals. We do not only test the regret regulation theory but also offer new areas in which it might be clarified and extended in line with the post-decision regret management strategies. The policy implications of the findings are discussed.

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