The influence of proactive personality on social entrepreneurial intentions among African American and Hispanic undergraduate students: the moderating role of hope

Abstract

INTRODUCTION In this present study, the author will explore the possibility that hope moderates the relationship between proactive personality and social entrepreneurial intentions among African-American and Hispanic undergraduate students. Research has begun to move from merely examining personality as a main effect (Barrick, Parks & Mount, 2005), to focus on the moderating or mediating effects that explain how personality influences a dependent variable. This approach can also be taken to examine the relationship between proactive personality and social entrepreneurial intentions and to investigate whether hope moderates this relationship. In the United States African-American and Hispanic communities are disproportionately more prone to poverty, violent crime and other social ills. Identifying and solving large scale social problems requires social entrepreneurs because only entrepreneurs have the committed vision and inexhaustible determination to persist until they have transformed an entire system (Drayton, 2005). Disadvantaged communities need social entrepreneurs to generate innovative solutions to complex problems to transform their societies. There is a need to figure out which individuals are most likely to have social entrepreneurial intentions in order to train and equip them with the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities that will allow them to be effective social entrepreneurs that are equipped to handle some of society's complex problems such as poverty, crime, HIV, etc. SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP The concept of social entrepreneurship has been rapidly emerging in the private, public and non-profit sectors over the last few years, and interest in social entrepreneurship continues to grow (Johnson, 2002). Currently, the non-profit sector is facing intensifying demands for improved effectiveness and sustainability in light of diminishing funding from traditional sources and increased competition for these scarce resources (Johnson, 2002). At the same time, the increasing concentration of wealth in the private sector is promoting calls for increased corporate social responsibility and more proactive responses to complex social problems, while governments at all levels are grappling with multiple demands on public funds (Johnson, 2002). Social entrepreneurship is emerging as an innovative approach for dealing with complex social needs (Johnson, 2002). With its emphasis on problem-solving and social innovation, socially entrepreneurial activities blur the traditional boundaries between the public, private and nonprofit sector, and emphasize hybrid models of for-profit and non-profit activities (Johnson, 2002). Promoting collaboration between sectors is implicit within social entrepreneurship, as is developing radical new approaches to solving old problems (Johnson, 2002). In the literature overall, the main definitional debates are over the locus of social entrepreneurship (Johnson, 2002). Thompson (2002) argues that social entrepreneurship exists primarily in the non-profit sector. Many define social entrepreneurship as bringing business expertise and market-based skills to the non-profit sector in order to help this sector become more efficient in providing and delivering these services (e.g., Reis, 1999). This category includes non-profits running small, for-profit businesses and channeling their earnings back into social service problems as well as non-profits adopting private sector management techniques in order to get more mileage out of existing resources" (McLeod, 1997). Boschee (1998) distinguishes between for-profit activities which serve to help offset an organization's costs, and what he calls 'social purpose ventures' whose primary purpose is to make a profit which can then be used for non-profit ventures. Others define social entrepreneurship more broadly, and argue that social entrepreneurship can occur within the public, private or non-profit sectors, and is in essence a hybrid model involving both for-profit and non-profit activities as well as cross-sectoral collaboration (Johnson, 2002). …