Assessment of entrepreneurial orientation and its relationship with gender and academic performance

Abstract

Entrepreneurial orientation is a key concept in the organizational context that is becoming increasingly important in the educational field, since the promotion of entrepreneurship has become one of the European Union’s main areas of action in relation to education. Given that the Escala de Orientación Emprendedora-Entrepreneurial Orientation Scale (EOE) is one of the few instruments that enable the assessment of entrepreneurial orientation among students, the first aim of the present study was to adapt it to Basque and validate it in that language (EOE-E). The second aim was to examine the relationship of entrepreneurial orientation with gender and academic performance. The sample comprised 735 students in vocational training. In relation to the first aim, the Confirmatory Factor Analysis corroborated the six-factor structure of the original questionnaire, presenting acceptable internal consistency and stability over time indexes. Evidence of convergent validity and evidence of validity based on relations with other variables, such as self-efficacy and personal initiative was also obtained. The results therefore confirm that evidence was obtained of validity and reliability of the instrument for assessing entrepreneurial orientation among students in vocational training. In terms of the second aim, men were found to have higher mean scores than women for competitiveness, whereas women scored higher than men for learning orientation. Furthermore, in comparison with their lower-performing counterparts, students with better academic grades scored higher for innovativeness, proactiveness, achievement orientation and learning orientation.