Intrinsic Rewards and Sustainability-Oriented Entrepreneurial Intentions: Reflections From Two Case Studies in India

Introduction

Entrepreneurship has been the apparent solution to employment generation and the nation's economic well-being over the last few decades. Significant empirical research findings indicate a positive impact of entrepreneurship on the nation's macroeconomic and regional development (Neumann, 2021; Gu et al., 2021; Audretsch & Belitski, 2021; Atems & Shand, 2018; Ács et al., 2014). However, entrepreneurship has also provided solutions to societal and environmental injustice and degradation in recent years, thus gaining relevance. The scholarly attention to this phenomenon has led to the emergence of a new area of entrepreneurship, Sustainable Entrepreneurship. Shepherd and Patzelt (2011) defined Sustainable Entrepreneurship as the “preservation of nature, life support, and community in the pursuit of perceived opportunities to bring into existence future products, processes, and services for gain, where the gain is broadly construed to include economic and non-economic gains to individuals, the economy, and society”. The difference between conventional and sustainable entrepreneurship is that the former focuses on economic gains, whereas the latter combines economic, social and environmental value creation (Vuorio et al., 2018).

While entrepreneurship has vastly developed as a field of research and practice, there is still ambiguity related to the motivation and value system of sustainability-oriented entrepreneurial ventures (Vuorio, 2017; Fayolle et al., 2014; Lumpkin et al., 2013). In this unconventional form of Entrepreneurship, one of the critical research works by Shepherd and Patzelt (2011) highlights the role of psychology in augmenting scholarly research by understanding the intention-behaviour mechanism. The two allied pillars of Sustainable Entrepreneurship are Sustainability-oriented Entrepreneurial Behaviour (SEB) and Sustainability-oriented Entrepreneurial Intentions (SEI), thus making SEI a fundamental construct for studying and comprehending Sustainable Entrepreneurship. Sung & Park (2018) defined SEI as “the intent to start a business that considers social and environmental issues”. The Theory of Planned Behaviour by Ajzen (1991) is the foundation that explains how intentions are built and affected by attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control and how these intentions eventually shape a behaviour. The critical contribution of the recent scholarly work establishes the legitimacy of the relationship between SEI and SEB (Ghosh & Prasad, 2021; Reynolds, 2017; Jarvis, 2016).