Research delves into cultural perceptions of entrepreneurship

Two Missouri State University faculty members are taking research on entrepreneurship worldwide through the E-WORLD project.

E-WORLD, an acronym for Entrepreneurship Work in Organization Requiring Leadership Development, is investigating how entrepreneurs are perceived in 41 countries worldwide.

Funded by a two-year, $71,200 grant that has been renewed for a third year from the MSU provost's office and $237,000 from the dean of the College of Business Administration, E-WORLD is spearheaded by MSU management professors Elizabeth Rozell and Wesley Scroggins.

Their research has taken them to more than a dozen countries, with plans to visit about that many more this year. Rozell departed for Australia and New Zealand April 18, while Scroggins will be visiting Russia and Eastern Europe this fall.

The researchers said the response to their efforts has been phenomenal.

"It has been more successful than we ever dreamed that it would be," said Rozell, MSU's Kenneth E. Meyer endowed professor of management.

Working with about 50 different collaborators in universities all over the world, "we had no idea the interest and intrigue that we would receive from all the different universities," she added. "People are really curious what entrepreneurs are like in other countries."

Crossing cultures

Rozell and Scroggins have completed Phase I of the E-WORLD project. That phase entailed establishing research relationships with collaborators at universities around the globe, such as University of Limerick in Ireland, University of Otago in New Zealand and Henan University of Finance and Economics in China, as well as with schools in countries including Brazil, Estonia, Sweden, Germany, Turkey and Taiwan.

Those collaborators have conducted focus groups with entrepreneurs in their respective countries and shared the results with the MSU team.

Based on that information, Rozell and Scroggins have developed questionnaires that ask participants to quantify their perceptions - for example, rating characteristics of entrepreneurs on a scale of one to seven. This data collection marks the beginning of Phase II.

The surveys, translated into more than a dozen languages and posted online through programs such as Zoomerang and Survey Monkey, are now being pilot-tested to make sure they are culturally equivalent.

"We don't want to assume that a questionnaire that we construct, (using) words that mean one thing to Americans, are going to mean the same thing in Bulgaria or China or South America," Scroggins said.

Online survey results are coming in, "so the task at this point will be to start analyzing the data from the various countries to see if it appears that people are understanding our questions ... in the same way," he added.

Once online surveys are complete, the data will be able to be downloaded into Excel or SPSS, the statistical package for social scientists, which allows researchers to "run all kinds of sophisticated analyses," Scroggins said.

Practical applications

Through E-WORLD, Rozell and Scroggins are seeking to identify "the cognitive prototype that people have of entrepreneurs in a given country," Scroggins said.

The study is patterned after Project Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness, or GLOBE, a long-term international effort that measured how people perceived leadership in various cultures.

"At the end of our study, we're hoping to have some training programs to help entrepreneurs if they want to do business in another country to understand what the image is of a successful entrepreneur in that country," Rozell said.

The hypothesis is that if people align themselves with a culture's perceptions of successful entrepreneurs, they will get more support for their efforts.

"We hope that we'll inform entrepreneurship education (programs) in universities, like here at MSU, where we have a major in entrepreneurship," Scroggins said.

But entrepreneurial prototypes aren't just useful for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs, Scroggins said.

"There are a lot of multinational businesses out there that are either looking to start operations in other countries or have existing operations (abroad) and want to send a U.S. manager there to oversee it. We think this will have implications for that as well," he added.

And for MSU, E-WORLD is raising the university's profile beyond just the relationships with other universities and faculty members. The project also is spawning papers and presentations in the U.S. and abroad.

"We have about 10 papers that we are working with - they're submitted to conferences, they're submitted to journals and they're about to be presented - and we've just started the publishing opportunities. All that we've submitted is just from our first phase of research," Rozell said.