Sports as a Stepping‑Stone for Entrepreneurship: Examining Sports University Students

Abstract

Sports and entrepreneurship have several common attributes. Therefore, when focusing on entrepreneurship among university students, sports students deserve special attention. The main aim of our exploratory study was to examine personality traits, enterprising tendencies and entrepreneurial propensity of sports students. Our study was based on data gathered through own data collection using a survey instrument comprising of established measures of enterprising tendencies and interpersonal aspect of personality, and items capturing individual’s entrepreneurial propensity and other personal and environmental attributes. We have collected 254 responses from 130 sports and 124 pedagogy students, who served as a comparison group. Our findings show that sports students exhibit higher enterprising tendency, significant differences in four out of eight examined general personality traits, and higher entrepreneurial propensity compared to their pedagogy counterparts. In search of potential origins of these differences and high embeddedness of entrepreneurship among sports students, we explored selected individual attributes as well as environmental factors related to respondents’ personal and university settings. Based on our findings, we develop implications for entrepreneurship encouragement and utilization of enterprising potential in sports student population.

Keywords

• entrepreneurship
• students
• sports
• enterprising tendency
• personality traits
• education