Adolescents’ entrepreneurial or employment intention for individualistic and communal business purposes

Abstract Adolescents today are increasingly more agentic and more communal than prior cohorts and want social and environmental change. When contemplating an occupation to provide them with income and self-actualization, they face a concurrent choice between employment and self-employed entrepreneurship and between individualistic (profit and work satisfaction) and communalistic (social impact and environmental restoration) business purposes. Employment choices may be restricted by high local unemployment, automation, and artificial intelligence. Noting that entrepreneurial behavior can be pursued independently or as an employee, their occupational choices include starting a firm or joining a firm as an employee (and acting entrepreneurially or not). We study the determinants of their occupational intentions and find bespoke configurations of their personal and parental characteristics that culminate in their occupational intention and their preferred combination of business purposes. Interestingly, most of the sampled adolescents did not exhibit traditional gender role expectations, males were mostly communalistic in their preferred business purposes, and no group of females sought profit as their primary business purpose. This paper contributes to the literatures on entrepreneurial intention, adolescent development, and parental influence on adolescent choice with implications for policy, education, and research.