| چکیده انگلیسی مقاله |
Objectives: Because of the role and the importance of entrepreneurship in economic development, it is necessary to conduct surveys in this field. Entrepreneurship as a multi-disciplinary subject has been considered from different perspectives. Social scientists, who have studied entrepreneurship, emphasize three distinct sets of variables: the institutional environment, demographic variables, and personal and psychological characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to study demographic variables of Iranian Entrepreneurs such as age, gender, marriage status, formal educations, parents’ educations and jobs, the family’s economic and social status, role modeling and so on in order to understand which one of them can be considered as an Entrepreneur characteristic. In direction of the paper objective, the following questions are brought up 1. What are demographic characteristics of an entrepreneur? 2. Is there a significant relation between the demographic characteristics of an entrepreneur and his entrepreneurial behavior? Method: This research is a descriptive survey and a questionnaire is used for data gathering. Statistical population consists of identified and introduced entrepreneurs by formal and related centers and organizations that have established (created) their own independent business. Totally a list of 310 entrepreneurs was obtained and the questionnaire was sent to them and 119 questionnaires have been returned. In this research, independent variable is demographic characteristics and dependent variable is entrepreneurial behavior. The latter, has three dimensions concluding: enterprise creation, organizational growth, and organizational innovation. The dependent variable according to determined indices has a score from 1 to 26. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze statistical data with SPSS software. Findings: 28% of entrepreneurs were between 40 and 50 years old. 86.4% of them were male and 62.4% were neither the first nor the last child of the family. 92.4% of entrepreneurs were marriages. 83.2% have academic education and 54% have been graduated from engineering disciplines. 57.3% of entrepreneurs’ fathers and 91.5% their mothers are under high school education. Self- employment parents, more than six years managerial experience and average or welfare economic levels, were the highest frequencies among the entrepreneurs. 46.2% of them have begun their first entrepreneurial activity between 25 and 35 years old. 59% of entrepreneurs had a role model, which 69.6% of the role models were among the relatives. In relation to the enterprises activity field, the highest frequency was industry sector with 74.8%. Results: The results show that male gender, academic education, engineering disciplines, self employee parents, suitable age for beginning entrepreneurship (under 35 years old), having average or welfare economic levels, and having a role model (specially among the relatives) are the characteristics that can be assigned to entrepreneurs. Also, according to results, components including gender, the beginning age for entrepreneurship, director managerial experience, and the enterprise size (at 99% level), and age (at 95% level) have significant relation with entrepreneurial behavior. Some what, this research results are the same as the famous researchers’ studies such as Fry (1993), Erickson (2003), Hisrich and Peters (2002). |