ENTREPRENEURIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND EMPLOYMENT GENERATION: A CASE STUDY OF MICRO ENTERPRISES

ENTREPRENEURIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND EMPLOYMENT GENERATION: A CASE STUDY OF MICRO ENTERPRISES

Project Details

ENTREPRENEURIAL CHARACTERISTICS AND EMPLOYMENT GENERATION: A CASE STUDY OF MICRO ENTERPRISES



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Description

Background to the Study
The economic and social development of any nation depends to a large extent on the emergency of a strong and vibrant private sector driven by entrepreneurship and this have brought several initiatives by government to foster the creation of more micro enterprises, strengthen the management capacity of the existing institutions and working out some modalities to provide easy access to capital for entrepreneurship development (Ungoani & Ibeenwo, 2015).
Entrepreneurship is defined as the identification of a new business opportunities and the mobilization of economic resources to initiate a new business or regenerate an existing business under the conditions of risk and uncertainties, for purpose of making profits under private ownership (Ayoade and Agwu, 2016). Entrepreneurship is a process which may develop a single entrepreneur or enterprise witt the main objective of making profit by using scarce resources most likely under private ownership (Adenusi, 2009). It is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled and this implies that a specific skill would appear to be particularly important, that of making use of resources that is outside the entrepreneur’s control, since entrepreneurial behavior implies pursuing opportunities regardless of the resources under control, the management task of planning, sourcing and coordinating resources come into play (Reynolds, 2005). This is described as the ability to create something from practically nothing and the willingness to take a moderate risk. According to Agbionu (2008), entrepreneurship involves a process aimed at creating wealth for the purpose of growth, development of the environment and eradication of unemployment for national economy sustainability.
An entrepreneur conceives a business opportunity, evaluates its techno-economic feasibility, and implements the project by combining different factors of production such as land, labour, and capital (Shacheendran & Mathew, 2015). The person that combines all the factors of production for productive use aiming to benefit or profit from such act is called an entrepreneur. Li (2009) divide the characteristics of entrepreneur into four, namely: personal characteristics; psychological characteristics; human capital and behavioural. The personal characteristics include the nature and the motives of self-employment that distinguishes self-employment with the entrepreneurial. The psychological characteristics include need for achievement, internal locus of control, take risks, creativity, and innovation. The human capital include education, work experience, experience, skills and technical knowledge, as well as the behavioral approaches that suggest competence to identify and define the characteristics of a successful manager.
In the study of Hisrich, Peter ad Shepherd (2008), they divides entrepreneurial characteristics to include: education, personal values, age, work experience, moral support network, and professional support network. According to Sorensen and Chang (2006) entrepreneurial characteristics that determine include psychological factors, education and experience, Level of education founder/owner business positively associated with business performance. Higher education is considered to have a better impact in entrepreneurship because it reflects the fact that they average more capable.
According to Blackman (2003), the characteristics of entrepreneur are into two types, namely: attribute and attained. Attribute is characteristic owned entrepreneur includes: age, gender, religion, the influence of the family (family influence) while attained qualifications include education, and business experience.
On the other hand, employment generation which is often associated with entrepreneurship is due to the diverse significant of entrepreneurship to economy is the process involve in engaging the labour force in productive activities in the economy. Full employment is the most desire employment condition in the economy. But, this is a ruse in developing countries like Nigeria, because it is a dream that is yet to be achieved (Yusuf, 2010). Beveridge (1994) defined full employment as situation where there are more jobs than men. Full employment does not mean that everybody in the labour force is employed. A condition of full employment can be said to exist if the number of unfilled vacancies is equal to the number of people who are out of work (Hanson, 1996). In any dynamic economy, some unemployment rate of 4 and 5 % will be compatible with the aims of full employment.
Unemployment is one of the problem of Nigeria and has given the stakeholders (government, employers of labour) sleepless night, in fact unemployment is a phenomenon of Nigeria which has degenerated the living condition of the masses, and entrepreneurship have been seen as a means of reducing unemployment (Ayoade and Agwu, 2016), but studies on entrepreneurship characteristics is yet to gain the attention among scholars and researchers. This study therefore deem it fit to study entrepreneurship characteristics and employment generation using micro enterprise as its case study.

Statement of the Problem
Unemployment has of recent become a global problem with developing nations of the world having the lion shares of the phenomenon. This has resulted in the migration of people from one region of the world to another in search of greener pastures. In the past three decades, Europe has seen people migrating from its Eastern to the Western part while Africa has lost so many of her bright scholars and potential citizens through migration to Europe even through unorthodox means such as through the Mediterranean Sea and savannah deserts in search of greener pastures. Researcher have investigated the past Nigerian government’s intervention efforts at addressing the phenomenon of unemployment and their effectiveness in encouraging entrepreneurship, with a view to facilitating employment generation (Ayoade and Agwu, 2016), yet there unemployment keep rising year after year. This might be because most of the studies focused on entrepreneurship and neglected the entrepreneurial characteristics of entrepreneurs such as creativity and innovation.
This necessitate a study on entrepreneurial characteristics and employment generation using micro enterprise as case study.

Objective of the Study
The broad objectives of this study is to investigate entrepreneurship characteristics and employment generation with focus on micro enterprises. The specific objectives are:
i. To establish the relationship between creativity of entrepreneur and employment generation.
ii. To investigate the impact of innovation on employment generation and;
iii. To determine the relationship between entrepreneurial characteristics and employment generation among micro enterprises.

Research Questions.
i. What is the relationship between creativity of entrepreneur and employment generation?
ii. What is the impact of innovation on employment generation?
iii. What is the relationship between entrepreneurial characteristics and employment generation among micro enterprises?

Research Hypotheses
The following null hypotheses were formulated and will be tested in this study.
HO1: There is no significant relationship between creativity of entrepreneur and employment generation.

HO2: There is no significant relationship between innovation and employment generation.
HO3: There is no significant impact of entrepreneurial characteristics and employment generation.

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