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ORIGINAL RESEARCH published: 22 April 2022

doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.861929

Edited by: Abdelkader Mohamed Sghaier

Derbali, University of Kairouan, Tunisia

Reviewed by: Noor Fareen Abdul Rahim,

Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia

Liana Stanca, Babeş-Bolyai University, Romania

*Correspondence: Shaowei Qu

[email protected] orcid.org/0000-0003-4943-7871

Specialty section: This article was submitted to

Educational Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology

Received: 25 January 2022 Accepted: 21 March 2022

Published: 22 April 2022

Citation: Zhu Y, Qu S, Jin H and Li Z (2022)

The Effect of Risk Prevention Ability on Entrepreneurial Performance

of Chinese College Students: Moderating Effect of Team

Management Ability. Front. Psychol. 13:861929.

doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.861929

The Effect of Risk Prevention Ability on Entrepreneurial Performance of Chinese College Students: Moderating Effect of Team Management Ability Yuting Zhu1, Shaowei Qu2* , Hebo Jin1 and Zhaohui Li2

1 School of Economics and Management, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China, 2 Institute of Educational Economics and Management, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China

Improving the performance and success rate of college students’ new ventures has attracted increasing attention globally. In this study, a questionnaire survey was conducted among 1500 college students who were directly involved in entrepreneurial activities in 23 provinces in China. The study explores the effects of team management and risk prevention abilities on college students’ entrepreneurial performance. The results show that risk prevention ability significantly increases university students’ entrepreneurial performance (e.g., profit and loss status, capital flow, and staff flow). Team management ability enhances these entrepreneurial indicators to varying degrees, with a “threshold” effect of its impact on entrepreneurial performance. With a continued increase in team management ability, the effect of risk prevention ability on entrepreneurial performance becomes increasingly more significant. Specifically, when team management ability reaches a medium level and above, risk prevention ability significantly improves capital flow and staff stability; and when team management ability reaches a high level, risk prevention ability significantly improves enterprise profitability indicators.

Keywords: risk prevention ability, team management ability, entrepreneurial performance, college students, moderation

INTRODUCTION

In the wake of COVID-19, China’s job market has been sluggish, while the number of college graduates in China has been rising. An important measure to resolve this contradiction is to strengthen entrepreneurship education (Long et al., 2021). The goal of entrepreneurship education is to equip students with entrepreneurial consciousness and ability and to train them to think innovatively. From the perspective of social value realisation, the purpose of entrepreneurship education is to raise the survival rate of college students’ entrepreneurial enterprises; the generation and improvement of college students’ entrepreneurial ability is an important objective symbol of improved entrepreneurial performance. At present, college students’ entrepreneurship in China is characterised by the “double low” situation of low participation and low success rates. How college

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students’ entrepreneurship performance can be enhanced is one of the key factors in ensuring the improvement of the “two low rates.”

Regarding the nature of entrepreneurial performance, there are arguments about “behaviour” and “result” in the academic circle (Cai and Zhou, 2008). Haber and Reichel (2005) defined entrepreneurial performance as the synthesis of short-term and long-term profits reflecting the operating conditions of enterprises from the perspective of process. Venkataraman (2004) defined entrepreneurial performance as the entrepreneurial achievement to realise economic benefits. Yang (2020) considered the results and benefits generated in the transformation of entrepreneurial ability into entrepreneurial practice from the perspective of performance results. In present study, mature enterprises’ performance is generally measured by return on total assets (Zhao and Sun, 2015), sales growth rate, return on investment, and market share, etc. The measurement of entrepreneurial performance is generally based on corporate financial indicators (Venkataraman, 2004) and non-financial indicators, such as corporate development prospects and service quality (Anderson and Sullivan, 1993). However, new ventures must first think about profit and survival (Xu et al., 2020). For survival, an enterprise’s survival time and overall life are measured (Ciavarella et al., 2004). There are also indicators that are based on the three dimensions of survival, growth, and innovation for measuring entrepreneurial performance (Zhan et al., 2020), including net income, sales, capital flow, market share, an enterprise’s operating time, and survival hopes (Ciavarella et al., 2004).

We contend that college and university students’ new ventures belong to the category of start-up and small–micro enterprises, and have distinct characteristics, such as short start- up time, financing difficulties, lack of operational experience and social capital, shortage of market resources, conflicts between entrepreneurship and academic progress, and even immature technology, as well as many other problems and challenges. Measurement of entrepreneurial performance should not be based on social enterprises’ financial indicators, but should focus more on the results achieved in the entrepreneurial process. In other words, the measurement should focus on “entrepreneurial process performance” and should emphasise entrepreneurial consciousness, spirit, and ability, as well as college students’ personal experiences. The accumulation of this human capital will become a key factor in future career development. College students’ entrepreneurial performance is the sum of stable operation, rational utilisation of resources, and periodic profits achieved in the entrepreneurial process.

The realisation of entrepreneurial performance is closely related to entrepreneurial ability. Entrepreneurship is a composite concept with many factors. Timmons et al. (1999) proposed that entrepreneurship was a highly dynamic process with the joint action of the three elements of opportunity, resources, and team. Therefore, scholars have actively discussed the relationship between entrepreneurial ability and entrepreneurial performance, including opportunity identification ability, resource integration ability, and team management ability (Sang et al., 2012; Chen and Chen, 2016;

Yang et al., 2019). Chandler and Hanks (1994) verified the positive impact of opportunity identification and resource integration on entrepreneurial performance.

In the context of Chinese society, half of the college students’ start-ups are small enterprises with a scale of 5–10 employees and are different from ordinary social entrepreneurship. (1) The enterprises are mainly start-ups with a short life cycle. (2) The enterprise scale mainly consists of small and micro enterprises, with limited start-up capital, few fixed assets, and small teams. (3) The business model mainly focuses on the replication and improvement of traditional industries; most of them start their businesses for the purpose of “employment,” with few business model innovations. (4) The commercial added value of the enterprise products, the product maturity, and the technology content is low. (5) The financing channels are narrow, and the financing scale is relatively small. (6) In terms of time, there is a conflict between entrepreneurship and study, the latter crowding out the time and energy for learning the professional knowledge and skills of entrepreneurs. College students’ entrepreneurial enterprises are small, with a short life cycle and low product maturity; these characteristics pose challenges to the enterprises’ survival and are unfavourable factors that give rise to many potential risks that directly influence or threaten the success of college students’ entrepreneurship. Therefore, risk prevention management ability is one of the key factors in ensuring the survival of college students’ venture enterprises. Botha and Robertson (2014) argued that successful entrepreneurs possessed higher risk management capabilities. Successful enterprise risk management can effectively enhance an enterprise’s value (Lechner and Gatzert, 2018), can smooth its income fluctuations, can reduce the impact of financial crises, and can improve its performance (Ashraf et al., 2017).

There is an interdependent relationship between entrepreneurial ability and performance (Mitchelmore and Rowley, 2010; RezaeiZadeh et al., 2017). For Chinese college student entrepreneurs, team management ability is an important ability for maintaining the operation of their enterprises. On the one hand, college students’ entrepreneurial enterprises have small teams, with friendship the main emotional connection; thus, it is critical to maintain team members’ participation in the construction of entrepreneurial enterprises. On the other hand, from the perspective of human capital, effective team management ability can help bring members’ diversity into play, can highlight each team member’s entrepreneurial advantages, and can avoid or reduce the probability of entrepreneurial risks from different dimensions. The team members of college students’ new ventures are typically schoolmates. Friendship and trust are the main factors in maintaining the stability of the team. Francis and Sandberg (2000) verified the effect of friendship on entrepreneurial teams and demonstrated that team building based on friendship could improve corporate performance. For college students’ new ventures, the essence of friendship is team management. Students’ new ventures are collaborative teams. Team members can maximise cohesion, tolerance, cooperation, and solidarity to establish a management power unit based on friendship, trust, morality, and ability recognition. This kind of management power ensures that new ventures can integrate

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resources, information, capital, market, and other links in the operation process sufficiently well to maximise benefits in effective, tacit, and active cooperation.

Studies have analysed the effects of social networks (Sun and Wei, 2021), network embedding (Yang et al., 2020), opportunity innovation (Chen et al., 2019), entrepreneurial motivation (Xu and Chen, 2017), entrepreneurial orientation (Ren et al., 2017a), and proactive personality (Ren et al., 2017b) on entrepreneurial performance to improve college students’ entrepreneurial performance. Scholars have also discussed the relationship between entrepreneurship education (An and Zhang, 2016), entrepreneurial capital (He and Song, 2015), entrepreneurial ability (Yang et al., 2019), and entrepreneurial performance. However, college students’ risk prevention and team management abilities and their interaction have rarely been discussed. Therefore, this study focuses on the effect of college students’ risk prevention ability on their entrepreneurial performance and how team management ability affects the entrepreneurial performance through effective risk prevention, to explore the relationship between risk prevention and entrepreneurial performance. The study explores how the success rate of college students’ entrepreneurship can be improved to provide a scientific basis for improving the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in colleges and universities.

HYPOTHESES

The Influence of College Students’ Risk Prevention Ability on Entrepreneurial Performance Risk management is the core competence of enterprise competitiveness and a core factor in enterprises’ internal systems control (Yang et al., 2018). Understanding, managing, and avoiding risk are important ways for entrepreneurs to reduce business failure. Risk refers to the probability of loss and significance of commercial risk (Mitchell, 1995). Vaughan and Vaughan (2001) believed that risk management included risk identification, risk quantification and evaluation, and risk management and control to continuously report on risk developments. Entrepreneurs who have the ability to understand, manage, and avoid risks can improve their business performance and increase their income (Okolie et al., 2021). The operation of entrepreneurial enterprises is a result of enterprise operation and capital flow adequacy (Padachi, 2006). Clarke and Varma (1999) believed that risk management was a strategic process and that the ultimate goal of risk prevention pretreatment was to ensure that enterprises achieved sustainable returns. Regarding the relationship between risk management and performance, the existing studies mainly focus on listed enterprises (Mohammed and Knápková, 2016), such as the positive impact of risk management on enterprises’ new product development performance (Mu et al., 2009). In addition, relevant empirical studies focus on financial institutions (Callahan and Soileau, 2017), that is, to increase the profitability of a company by reducing different operating and marginal costs and reducing the uncertainty of stock market returns (Eckles et al., 2014).

Enterprise risk management can reduce different types of costs associated with enterprises’ operational and non-operational activities (Khan et al., 2016), as well as different types of risk disclosure (Florio and Leoni, 2016). There is no doubt that risk management plays a significant role in improving mature enterprises’ performance. The question is whether this effect exists in new ventures, especially college students’ new ventures. Yang (2020) employed a logistic regression model to explore the impact of graduates’ entrepreneurial ability factors on entrepreneurial performance and found that risk prevention had the most significant impact of all entrepreneurial ability factors. Therefore, ensuring an enterprise’s smooth operations requires risk prevention ability. In particular, college students’ new ventures are vulnerable to risk threats, as they are mainly small- and micro-scale start-ups with low customer stickiness due to low product maturity. In this study, the risk prevention ability of college students’ new ventures refers to the comprehensive ability of enterprises to realise, predict, control, and dispose of risks. The hypotheses that follow are proposed based on the above analysis.

H1: Risk prevention ability can improve the entrepreneurial performance of college students’ new ventures.

The Influence of College Students’ Team Management Ability on Entrepreneurial Performance An enterprise’s leadership establishes the team management and decides the enterprise’s development direction. The complexity of internal processes is positively correlated with the complexity of entrepreneurial activities. Individuals often cannot manage entrepreneurial activities; thus, the establishment and management of an entrepreneurial team have become an indispensable ability for entrepreneurs. Team management is different from leadership, which is the ability to inspire and guide followers to achieve their goals (Renko et al., 2015). Team management ability is an important quality for entrepreneurs to unite internal staff, ensure smooth communication among employees, and achieve stable operations. It is also the embodiment of team cohesion.

The role of an entrepreneurial team includes leading, organising, and communicating. The first step for college students is to establish an entrepreneurial team. The simple sum of team members’ human capital may not affect entrepreneurial performance; however, the heterogeneity of the entrepreneurial team does (Jin et al., 2017). Chen and Chen (2016) verified the mediating effect of entrepreneurial team characteristics on an enterprise’s financial, market, and competitive performance. College students’ entrepreneurial team members suffer from a lack of work experience and slow transformation of knowledge to skills. The natural weakness of team members is bound to affect team behaviour and, therefore, enterprise performance (Hu et al., 2017). To build a heterogeneous entrepreneurial team, it is necessary for college students to be able to manage teams. The impact of team leadership on entrepreneurial performance has been demonstrated (Knipfer et al., 2018; Miao et al., 2019). However, in a complex entrepreneurial environment,

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team members must communicate fully to ensure that they give full play to their innovative talents (Hart, 2014; Zhou, 2016). Chen et al. (2020) believed that it was difficult to achieve this through team leadership. By proposing the concept of shared leadership, they demonstrated that shared team leadership could improve entrepreneurial performance by giving full play to the leadership ability of each entrepreneurial team member, conducting team self-reflection, and crossing teams. El-Awad et al. (2017) regard a team as an information processor, and a timely and accurate information processing ability can promote performance. Meanwhile, self-regulating teams improve corporate performance by adjusting team behaviour and operation mode; however, this process is challenging (Forsstrom- Tuominen et al., 2019). Leadership plays a positive role in promoting information processing ability (Knipfer et al., 2018) and realising team self-regulation (Lyubovnikova et al., 2017), while shared leadership (Chen et al., 2020) also plays a positive role. For college student entrepreneurs, leadership means playing the leading role in the entrepreneurial team, while shared leadership means playing the communication and coordination role in the entrepreneurial team; however, both are within the scope of team management ability. That is, enterprises with high levels of team management ability are characterised by effective integration of resources, rapid identification of opportunities, and smooth communication of information, and thus continuously improve their performance. The hypotheses that follow are proposed based on the above analysis.

H2: Team management ability can improve the performance of college students’ new venture.

Moderating Effect of Team Management Ability When faced with uncertainty in a turbulent market, management thinking and behaviour will affect enterprise risk management practice. Therefore, to improve enterprise performance, both enterprise risk management ability and some internal management ability are required (Arena et al., 2010). The team management ability of college students’ new ventures is a key factor in preventing and controlling the risk of enterprise operation. Team management ability is manifested by the cohesion of employees. When faced with risks, a team with high cohesion can effectively tackle the risks and formulate a solution to risks, thus achieving sustainable operations and revenue performance on the premise of ensuring the smooth operation of the enterprise. Existing studies have shown that entrepreneurial team heterogeneity can improve the performance of start-ups by giving play to the skill diversity of members (Finkelstein and Hambrick, 1996), but team member heterogeneity may also lead to conflict and reduce the performance of start-ups (O’Reilly et al., 1989). Adjusting team conflicts and supporting and enabling the self-regulating role of the team will help avoid the occurrence of risks (Wu et al., 2019). Following the transformation of a new venture to business model, the impact of resolving relationship conflicts on improving team performance is particularly significant (Boone et al., 2020). Strong team management ability improves

the effect of risk control and management; in contrast, low team management ability will lead to the expansion of the enterprise risk coefficient.

Specifically, when there is insufficient team management ability, the channel of communication within the team is not smooth, which reduces the information transmission speed. Information asymmetry and information flow occlusion result in enterprises’ inability to discover potential risks in time. Reduced team management ability can lead to the breakdown of communication mechanism, and enterprises will be unable to control the risks quickly. Poor cooperation leads to unclear division of power and responsibility among employees and reduced team cohesion, which further intensifies internal conflicts and loosens the internal structure. Continuous internal friction among teams leads to an expansion of the enterprise risk coefficient and the generation of new risks. Risks are interdependent, and the occurrence of risk may result in the emergence of continuous risks (Venkatesh et al., 2015). For the existing risks, the chaotic team order and low-risk management ability can lead to further expansion of the risk coefficient, and an inability to effectively mitigate the impact of internal and external risks on the enterprise, threatening the enterprise’s survival. The reduced team cohesion and the loss of core team members trigger incomplete personnel allocation, which ultimately leads to a decline in enterprise performance and possibly the shutdown of the enterprise’s operation. The hypotheses that follow are proposed based on the above analysis.

H3: Team management ability positively moderates the impact of risk prevention on entrepreneurial performance.

DATA

Procedure The scale of the risk prevention ability factor was modified according to the study by Okolie et al. (2021), while that

TABLE 1 | Questionnaire.

Indicator Item

Risk prevention ability

A11 Have strong risk awareness and standard measures

A12 Have preventive measures against risks in market and technology fields

A13 Able to anticipate, control and deal with potential risks

Team management ability

A21 Able to build the core team needed to start a business

A22 Able to ensures a high degree of division of labor among team members

A23 Able to established an effective communication mechanism within the team

Entrepreneurial performance

Y1 What is the current profit and loss status of your enterprise

Y2 What is the current capital flow status of your enterprise

Y3 What is the current staff flow of your enterprise

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TABLE 2 | Descriptive statistics and correlation analysis.

Mean STD A11 A12 A13 A21 A22 A23 Y1 Y2 Y3

A11 3.61 0.940 1.000

A12 3.58 0.915 0.816** 1.000

A13 3.59 0.938 0.814** 0.803** 1.000

A21 3.59 0.955 0.747** 0.742** 0.723** 1.000

A22 3.64 0.917 0.751** 0.752** 0.726** 0.815** 1.000

A23 3.62 0.940 0.770** 0.759** 0.744** 0.791** 0.831** 1.000

Y1 2.76 0.940 0.120** 0.107** 0.131** 0.105** 0.101** 0.127** 1.000

Y2 2.65 1.172 0.088** 0.098** 0.072** 0.060* 0.058* 0.053* 0.345** 1.000

Y3 2.98 1.071 0.100** 0.111** 0.110** 0.089** 0.084** 0.078** 0.263** 0.432** 1.000

*p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.

of team management ability was modified following Yang (2020). A 5-level Likert-scoring scale was adopted, with 1 denoting a low degree of compliance and 5 a high degree. Regarding the performance indicators for college students’ new ventures, this study refers to the design of entrepreneurial performance indicators in Yang’s (2020) study, as well as the financial indicators for mature enterprises and start-ups. It considers the target motivation of college students’ new ventures, namely, market cash flow and performance, to design six questions. Following the Delphi method and verification by exploratory factor analysis, three indicators were finally determined to represent entrepreneurial performance, namely, profit and loss (P&L) status (Y1), capital flow (Y2), and staff flow (Y3). Each index contained three items, as shown in Table 1.

We invited 1,500 students from general and vocational colleges in 23 provinces to participate in the survey. All questionnaires were distributed online, of which 1,467 were recalled. By reserving the choices of “whole-heartedly starting my own business” and “entering college but continuing to start my own business,” 1,090 questionnaires were obtained. To ensure the accuracy of the results, responses containing null values were removed, and 1,054 questionnaire data were finally obtained. The effective recovery rate was 70.27%.

Simple Based on the regional distribution characteristics of the sample, 32 were in northeast China (3.04%), 174 in eastern China (16.51%), 40 in central China (3.80%), 805 in western China (76.38%), and 3 in Hong Kong and Macao (0.28%). In the sample structure, 411 were men (38.99%) and 643 were women (61.01%). Among the acquired degrees, 222 (21.06%) students had specialised degrees, 725 (68.79%) students had bachelor’s degrees, and 107 (10.1%) students had master’s degrees. From the grades in the sample, 190 were junior students, accounting for 11.20%, 118 were senior students, accounting for 18.03%, 406 and 283 were freshmen and sophomores, accounting for 38.52% and 26.85%, respectively, and 57 were graduate students, accounting for 5.41%. There were 924 students from ordinary colleges, accounting for 87.67%, and 130 students from vocational colleges, accounting for 12.33%.

The mean values, standard deviations, and correlation results for risk prevention ability, team management ability, and entrepreneurial performance are shown in Table 2. All the </

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