This study is carried out under the background that entrepreneurship has become increasingly popular in recent years along with the development of new technologies and increasing people have start to create their new business and join entrepreneurship. This study aims to provide certain implications for entrepreneurs to ensure success in entrepreneurship from the perspective of self-leadership. As entrepreneurship often encounter risks and uncertainties, effective self-leadership strategies should be used by entrepreneurs to deal with the uncertainties and risks. Self-leadership is related to the self-direction and self-motivation capabilities of individuals, and could also affect the emotion and behaviors of entrepreneurs in entrepreneurial process. This study helps to understand how entrepreneurs could use self-leadership to improve entrepreneurial self-efficacy.
The research uses a quantitative method in the form of questionnaire to generate primary data. The RSLQ that developed by Houghton and Neck (2002) has been used in this study to measure self-leadership, while the scale of Kickul & D’Intino (2005) is employed to measure entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Participants for the questionnaire are selected from entrepreneurs who have started their own businesses in the past five years and currently are still running the businesses using purposive sampling method. Using an online questionnaire, it offers convenience for participants to complete the questionnaire directly on internet. 57 valid questionnaires have been collected to investigate the current situation about self-leadership and explore its effect on entrepreneurial self-efficacy.
The results show that 1) among the three types of self-leadership strategies, behavior-focused strategies are most significant among the selected entrepreneurs; Constructive thought pattern strategies are moderately observed among the entrepreneurs, while natural reward is not popular among the entrepreneurs; 2) gender has a significant influence on the adoption of constructive thought pattern strategies, but has no significant influence on the another strategies; 3) self-goal setting, Visualizing successful performance, and Evaluating belief and assumptions of self-leadership have significant effects on entrepreneurial self-efficacy
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