The Influence of the Fear of Failure on the Entrepreneurial Behaviour of Chinese and United Kingdom Agricultural Students

This paper determines whether fear of failure influences the relationship between perceived entrepreneurial opportunity and entrepreneurial action for students who study agriculture at universities in the UK and China. It uses the international Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data as the baseline which provides the ability to compare national and international data for entrepreneurial attitudes. The study looks at 679 students from both Chinese and UK Agricultural Universities. The total early-stage entrepreneurship activity rate for these students is higher than the national averages demonstrating that agricultural students are more entrepreneurial. For Chinese students’ opportunity identification has a significant positive affect on their entrepreneurial behaviour. However, this was not seen in the case of the UK students. In both cohorts, the relationship between perceived entrepreneurial opportunity and entrepreneurial action was negatively mediated by fear of failure. The study contributes to the literature: firstly it challenges the core assumption that fear of failure is a premier obstruction to entrepreneurial action; secondly it provides a contextualised international study on the relationship between perceived entrepreneurial opportunity, fear of failure and entrepreneurial action. Thirdly, it calls for further contextualised education to experiential education to help develop the practice, behaviour and skills required to be entrepreneur.