2.1. Mediating Role of Learning Orientation
Individual career uncertainty prevails in our world today. Sustainable careers can be achieved through one’s lifespan. A key factor having sustainable careers is “person-career fit, or the extent to which an individual’s career experiences are compatible with their needs, values, interests, and talents” [
6] (p. 2). Entrepreneurship is an important career option. An increasing number of individuals have chosen an entrepreneurial career [
16], which is attractive, but arguably full of high uncertainty [
40]. As such, protecting the career sustainability of entrepreneurs over time is of utmost importance [
2]. However, research in the field of sustainable entrepreneurial career is still in its infancy.
Entrepreneurial career differs from traditional ones in organizations [
42]. Bird defined an entrepreneurial career as “the process of deciding to begin and to continue operating as an entrepreneur” [
43] (p. 173). Farrington et al. defined an entrepreneurial career as “owning and managing one’s own small business” [
44] (p. 4). The two key tasks in the first stage of entrepreneurship are the identification of entrepreneurial opportunity and the formation of entrepreneurial intention [
18,
40]. By building on the insight from prior studies, we defined entrepreneurial career intention as a state of mind in which people intend to create their own business and occupy different roles in running their own business and engage in the necessary entrepreneurial activities during their future working life. Entrepreneurial career intention reveals the amount of struggle and tenacity of an individual who is eager to perform actions to start a new business [
43,
45,
46]. Knowing what drives people to become entrepreneurs remains a significant issue in entrepreneurship studies [
17]. Given the increasing importance of entrepreneurship in contemporary careers [
15,
47], uncovering the determinants of entrepreneurial career intention is crucial.
Time perspective is defined by Zimbardo and Boyd [
28] as “the often non-conscious personal attitude that each of us holds towards time and the process whereby the continual flow of existence is bundled into time categories that help to give order, coherence, and meaning to our lives” (p. 51). Zimbardo and Boyd [
29] argued that time perspectives “exert a dynamic influence on many important judgments, decisions, and actions” (p. 18). Generally, time perspectives can be categorized into three types: past time perspective, present time perspective, and FTP [
26,
27,
28,
29]. As a cognitive-motivational construct [
13,
23,
27,
31], FTP reveals a general future orientation [
27] and refers to a person’s perception of his future and his expectations of upcoming goals in the current moment [
48]. FTP comprises global and domain-specific subjective expectations and evaluations of the future and is a complex way of organizing subjectively one’s cognitions, evaluations, and behaviors concerning the future [
26].
We argued that FTP could help individuals form entrepreneurial career intentions for two major reasons. First, FTP enables individuals to identify a desirable and feasible entrepreneurial opportunity, which is often considered a strong predictor of the intention to become entrepreneurs to pursue the opportunity. FTP helps people obtain the capacity to look far ahead in the future, such that individuals high in FTP can anticipate the more distant future [
21,
30], deal with long time intervals wherein they can set motivational goals, plans, and projects, conduct present actions, and strive toward goals in the future [
13,
23,
30,
31]. Individuals with FTP tend to formulate long means-goals structures [
21]. Individuals high in FTP are greatly inspired toward goals situated in the future, thereby developing and enhancing their cognitions and actions essential for achieving the goals [
26,
27,
28,
49]. As a consequence, individuals with FTP tend to be willing to exert more efforts to engage in the proactive exploration of entrepreneurial opportunities [
13,
26,
27]. People high in FTP are also more likely to believe they can discover many entrepreneurial opportunities because they perceive the amount of time they have left to search for the opportunities to be greater than people with low in FTP [
18]. As such, individuals with FTP tend to discover more promising entrepreneurial opportunities, thereby increasing their likelihood of forming entrepreneurial career intention to pursue opportunities [
3,
13,
17,
18,
50].
Second, FTP provides individuals with the requisite motivation to transform entrepreneurial opportunities identified in the intention to choose an entrepreneurial career. FTP helps people gain the capacity to ascribe high value to mid-range future goals, such that individuals high in FTP can perceive present tasks as more valuable because they lead to more highly valued future goals [
21,
30]. Individuals with FTP are likely to attribute considerable significance to their present actions on searching for entrepreneurial opportunities [
18,
26,
27]. Accordingly, people with FTP tend to conscientiously plan for, practice for, and cope with the processes and consequences of entrepreneurial opportunity identification, which enable them to find feasible and desirable opportunities [
26,
27,
30,
51]. Individuals high in FTP also tend to believe they are better able to cope with unavoidable negative future consequences and obtain positive future consequences [
26], thereby attaining a sense of mastery and control over the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities [
27]. As a result, individuals with FTP tend to increase their confidence in the transformation of identified opportunities into entrepreneurial career intention [
3,
13,
18,
33]. For these reasons, we proposed the following:
Hypothesis 1 (H1). FTP is positively associated with entrepreneurial career intention.
Individual learning is a dialectical process that involves people’s access to current information and their capacity to integrate such a new understanding in their present base of knowledge [
37]. Learning is thus a process through which individuals convert new experiences into combinations of fresh and existing information [
52]. Learning orientation refers to the propensity of individuals to continually search for fresh information [
53] to obtain and master new abilities [
54,
55]. Learning theory indicates that the propensity to obtain fresh understanding and eventually incorporate this understanding into an existing knowledge base improves individual ability needed to cope with issues and uncertain circumstances; the reason is that the continuous updating of a current knowledge base improves the ability to identify new alternatives to present issues [
21].
The future theory of time helps us recognize why the actions and decisions of individuals are affected by the conscious and unconscious expectations of their future selves [
56]. Research on the motivational dynamics of time perspective emphasizes the role of the future as a regulatory aspect of human behavior [
30,
57]. FTP incorporates affective and cognitive components [
49,
58]. The affective component is defined as a temporal attitude [
51] and represents future events’ emotional valence. The cognitive components of FTP contribute to the nature of future-projected events, in terms of time extension (i.e., how far these events will be projected in the future) and in terms of content (i.e., degree of objective realism, number of future-projected events, and clarification of such objectives). The future may be optimistically viewed with a sense of trust in achieving future goals or may instead be regarded as somewhat challenging [
59]. Scholars highlight the positive relationship of FTP with several key constructs, such as academic achievement [
31,
32,
60], motivation [
23], and career adaptability [
48].
We argued that individuals with high FTP likely formulate a strong learning orientation for two important reasons. First, FTP shapes individual behavior because it serves as a guideline, particularly in uncertain circumstances, by cognitively structuring the future and by evaluating possible means (strategies) and outcomes [
13,
29]. FTP is a type of instrumentality for individuals to reach a goal in the future [
30,
51,
58]. People with FTP tend to place effort into present activities that they perceive to be instrumental in achieving future goals [
21,
23,
30]. Thus, individuals high in FTP are likely to be dedicated to their current learning tasks to upgrade the knowledge base needed to achieve future goals [
26,
29]. Second, as noted previously, FTP helps people place a high value on future goals [
21,
23,
30]. Individuals with FTP tend to be willing to sacrifice present enjoyment and study hard to develop the skills and competencies essential for achieving valuable future goals [
24,
29]. Empirical studies support this line of reasoning. For example, Zimbardo and Boyd [
29] showed that individuals with FTP learned more. Based on the above logic, we proposed the following:
Hypothesis 2 (H2). FTP is positively associated with a learning orientation.
Learning orientation reflects individuals’ propensity to build a knowledge base and develop skills and competencies continuously. It acts as a critical trigger for individual entrepreneurial career intention [
40]. We argued that learning orientation is associated positively with individual entrepreneurial career intention for three major reasons.
First, learning orientation helps people enhance their knowledge base, acquire skills and competencies, and master new situations [
38], which contributes to the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities [
50]. Individuals with a strong learning orientation have both the willingness and ability to engage in a proactive search for entrepreneurial opportunities, thereby increasing the likelihood of forming entrepreneurial career intention to pursue opportunities [
18,
40,
50].
Second, learning orientation enables individuals to increase their self-efficacy in identifying entrepreneurial opportunities [
55]. Learning orientation is powerful for decreasing the uncertainty that underlies complicated assignments [
53,
58] because it improves individuals’ ability to cope with difficulties through continuous updating of present knowledge that allows them to see different alternatives [
40,
60,
61]. Thus, individuals with high learning orientation will never succumb to challenges and hardships in the process of searching for entrepreneurial opportunities, thereby enhancing their confidence to find out promising opportunities [
40,
50,
55].
Third, learning orientation motivates individuals to transform feasible and desirable opportunities into entrepreneurial career intention [
18,
40,
50]. A key characteristic of a career as an entrepreneur is the intrinsic probability of failure and the related challenge of reducing the chances of failure [
13,
40]. Learning orientation helps people increase their commitment to highly valued future goals [
30,
38,
40,
55]. Thus, individuals with a strong learning orientation are willing to be well prepared to cope with challenging tasks [
40,
55], uncertainties, and risks in the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities [
13,
44]. Individuals with a powerful learning orientation tend to be interested in complicated and knowledge-intensive tasks and activities [
40] and perceive that they can deal effectively with the problems of future entrepreneurial operations [
40,
60,
61,
62]. As such, individuals with high learning orientation are likely to adapt themselves more easily to the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities, thereby enhancing their motivation to transform promising opportunities into the intention to choose a career as an entrepreneur [
18,
40,
50,
55].
Following the above logic, we expected a mediating role of learning orientation between FTP and individual entrepreneurial career intention. Thus, we proposed the following:
Hypothesis 3 (H3). Learning orientation mediates the relationship between FTP and entrepreneurial career intention.
2.2. Moderating Role of Entrepreneurial Passion for Founding
Entrepreneurship is considered a tale of passion [
39]. The nature of entrepreneurial passion is conceptualized by Cardon et al. [
39] as “consciously accessible, intense positive feelings experienced by engagement in entrepreneurial activities associated with roles that are meaningful and salient to the self-identity of the entrepreneur” (p. 517).
In terms of the three distinct sets of tasks and activities of an entrepreneurial process, entrepreneurial passion is divided into three types: (1) passion for inventing, which pertains to activities associated with inventing new products or services, (2) passion for founding, which pertains to activities associated with assembling financial, human, and social resources essential for creating a new venture, and (3) passion for developing, which pertains to activities associated with nurturing, growing, and expanding an established venture [
63]. We only examined entrepreneurial passion for founding because this study focused solely on individuals who are not yet entrepreneurs. Individual passion for founding refers to activities that focus on building new ventures to exploit entrepreneurial opportunities [
39]. Although research indicates that passion is important in entrepreneurial processes, the role of passion for founding in the formation of entrepreneurial career intention has not received adequate attention in empirical research [
36,
39,
63,
64,
65,
66].
We argued that entrepreneurial passion for founding strengthens the positive relationship between learning orientation and entrepreneurial career intention for three major reasons. First, entrepreneurial passion for founding enables individuals to become involved in novel and creative tasks and activities, specifically germane to the intention of a career as an entrepreneur [
39,
63]. When individuals have a strong entrepreneurial passion for founding, such individuals with a learning orientation tend to establish actively a new knowledge base and acquire new skills and competencies [
38]. They also engage in seeking proactively for promising entrepreneurial opportunities, which constitutes an important trigger for forming entrepreneurial career intention to pursue opportunities [
39,
40,
50,
63].
Second, entrepreneurial passion for founding activates individuals’ persistence in goal pursuit [
39]. When individuals’ entrepreneurial passion for founding is high, such individuals with learning orientation are likely to be willing to exert continuous efforts to integrate new knowledge into their present knowledge base and cope with obstacles and impediments during the process of identifying and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities, thereby increasing their confidence to seek out desirable and feasible opportunities [
39,
40,
55,
63].
Third, entrepreneurial passion for founding has a positive effect on individuals’ absorption with tasks and activities associated closely with the intention to choose a career as an entrepreneur [
39]. When individuals have a strong entrepreneurial passion for founding, such individuals with learning orientation tend to enhance their commitment to future goals [
40,
55] and then to be concentrated and engrossed deeply in identifying entrepreneurial opportunities, thereby enhancing their motivation to transform promising opportunities into entrepreneurial career intention [
39,
40,
55,
63].
Following this reasoning, we expected entrepreneurial passion for founding to enhance the positive effect of learning orientation on entrepreneurial career intention. Thus, we proposed the following:
Hypothesis 4 (H4). Entrepreneurial passion for founding moderates the positive relationship between learning orientation and entrepreneurial career intention.
Building on the above hypotheses, we proposed our conceptual model, as shown in
Figure 1.