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Students Attitude towards Self-Employment

Project Report

Submitted to: Prof. Jaishree Desai

Submitted by: Amir Malik Fin 1, MBA (SS10-12)

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Acknowledgement

This project has been a great learning experience about the students attitude and intensions in life. I am thankful to so many wonderful people who helped me to complete this project with their valuable feedback. I thank my Prof. Jaishree Desai for the opportunity of understanding the attitude of students towards self-employment. This project also made me think what I could do career. I thank all researcher for publishing their study and all the students for their valuable input in completing this project.

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Table of content

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Introduction
An attitude can be defined as a positive or negative evaluation of people, objects, event, activities, ideas, or just about anything in your environment. In the opinion of Bain (1927), an attitude is "the relatively stable overt behavior of a person which affects his status." "Attitudes which are different to a group are thus social attitudes or `values' in the Thomasonian sense. The attitude is the status-fixing behavior. This differentiates it from habit and vegetative processes as such, and totally ignores the hypothetical 'subjective states' which have formerly been emphasized. It is how one judges any person, situation or object. North (1932) has defined attitude as "the totality of those states that lead to or point toward some particular activity of the organism. The attitude is, therefore, the dynamic element in human behavior, the motive for activity." For Lumley (1928) an attitude is "a susceptibility to certain kinds of stimuli and readiness to respond repeatedly in a given waywhich are possible toward our world and the parts of it which impinge upon us." They develop on the ABC model (affect, behavior, and cognition). The affective response is an emotional response that expresses an individual's degree of preference for an entity. The behavioral intention is a verbal indication or typical behavioral tendency of an individual. The cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of the entity that constitutes an individual's beliefs about the object most attitudes are the result of either direct experience or observational learning from the environment.

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Attitude change
1. Target Characteristics: These are characteristics that refer to the person who receives and processes a message. One such trait is intelligence - it seems that more intelligent people are less easily persuaded by one-sided messages. Another variable that has been studied in this category is self-esteem. Although it is sometimes thought that those higher in self-esteem are less easily persuaded, there is some evidence that the relationship between self-esteem and persuasibility is actually curvilinear, with people of moderate self-esteem being more easily persuaded than both those of high and low self-esteem levels (Rhodes & Woods, 1992). The mind frame and mood of the target also plays a role in this process.

2. Source Characteristics: The major source characteristics are expertise, trustworthiness and interpersonal attraction or attractiveness. The credibility of a perceived message has been found to be a key variable here; if one reads a report about health and believes it came from a professional medical journal, one may be more easily persuaded than if one believes it is from a popular newspaper. Some psychologists have debated whether this is a long-lasting effect and Holland and Weiss (1951) found the effect of telling people that a message came from a credible source disappeared after several weeks (the so-called "sleeper effect"). Whether there is a sleeper effect is controversial. Perceived wisdom is that if people are informed of the source of a message before hearing it, there is less likelihood of a sleeper effect than if they are told a message and then told its source.

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3. Message Characteristics: The nature of the message plays a role in persuasion. Sometimes presenting both sides of a story is useful to help change attitudes. When people are not motivated to process the message, simply the number of arguments presented in a persuasive message will influence attitude change, such that a greater number of arguments will produce greater attitude change.

4. Cognitive Routes: A message can appeal to an individual's cognitive evaluation to help change an attitude. In the central route to persuasion the individual is presented with the data and motivated to evaluate the data and arrive at an attitude changing conclusion. In the peripheral route to attitude change, the individual is encouraged to not look at the content but at the source. This is commonly seen in modern advertisements that feature celebrities. In some cases, physician, doctors or experts are used. In other cases film stars are used for their attractiveness.

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Components of emotion appeals

Any discrete emotion can be used in a persuasive appeal; this may include jealousy, disgust, indignation, and fear, blue, disturbed, haunted, and anger. Fear is one of the most studied emotional appeals in communication and social influence research. Important consequences of fear appeals and other emotion appeals include the possibility of reactance which may lead to either message rejections or source rejection and the absence of attitude change. As the EPPM suggests, there is an optimal emotion level in motivating attitude change. If there is not enough motivation, an attitude will not change; if the emotional appeal is overdone, the motivation can be paralyzed thereby preventing attitude change. Emotions perceived as negative or containing threat are often studied more than perceived positive emotions like humor. Though the inner-workings of humor are not agreed upon, humor appeals may work by creating incongruities in the mind. Recent research has looked at the impact of humor on the processing of political messages. While evidence is inconclusive, there appears to be potential for targeted attitude change is receivers with low political message involvement. Important factors that influence the impact of emotion appeals include self-efficacy, attitude accessibility, issue involvement, and message/source features. Self-efficacy is a perception of ones own human agency; in other words, it is the perception of our own ability to deal with a situation. It is an important variable in emotion appeal messages because it dictates a persons ability to deal with both the emotion and the situation. For example, if a person is not self-

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Efficacious about their ability to impact the global environment, they are not likely to change their attitude or behavior about global warming. Dillard (1994) suggests that message features such as source nonverbal communication, message content, and receiver differences can impact the emotion impact of fear appeals. The characteristics of a message are important because one message can elicit different levels of emotion for different people. Thus, in terms of emotion appeals messages, one size does not fit all. Attitude accessibility refers to the activation of an attitude from memory in other words, how readily available is an attitude about an object, issue, or situation. Issue involvement is the relevance and salience of an issue or situation to an individual. Issue involvement has been correlated with both attitude access and attitude strength. Past studies conclude accessible attitudes are more resistant to change

Implicit and explicit attitude

There is also considerable research on implicit attitudes, which are generally unacknowledged or outside of awareness, but have effects that are measurable through sophisticated methods using people's response times to stimuli. Implicit and explicit attitudes seem to affect people's behavior, though in different ways. They tend not to be strongly associated with each other, although in some cases they are. The relationship between them is poorly understood.

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ENTREPRENEURSHIP

An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative. The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the IrishFrench economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to help launch a new venture or enterprise and accept full responsibility for the outcome. JeanBaptiste Say, a French economist, is believed to have coined the word "entrepreneur" in the 19th century - he defined an entrepreneur as "one who undertakes an enterprise, especially a contractor, acting as intermediary between capital and labor".

The entrepreneur leads the firm or organization and also demonstrates leadership qualities by selecting managerial staff. Management skill and strong team building abilities are essential leadership attributes for successful entrepreneurs. Scholar Robert. B. Reich considers leadership, management ability, and teambuilding as essential qualities of an entrepreneur. This concept has its origins in the work of Richard Cantillon in his Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en (1755) and Jean-Baptiste Say in his Treatise on Political Economy.

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Self-employment

Self-employment is working for one's self. Self-employed people can also be referred to as a person who works for himself/herself instead of an employer, but drawing income from a trade or business that they operate personally. To be self-employed is not necessarily the same as being a business owner: Many self-employed people conduct the day-to-day operations of the business, either as managers as line workers or both. A business owner may or may not work in the business, and is not required do so.

Policymakers increasingly view self-employment in the form of youth entrepreneurship as a possible solution to the youth unemployment crisis. However, many experts believe only 20% of all people are fit to run their own businesses, so it shouldn't be relied on as an "easy fix".

A survey reveals that in rural India, more than half of all workers were self-employed - 57% among males and nearly 62% among females. The corresponding figures in urban India were 42% for male and 44% for female. The percentage of regular wage and salaried employees was relatively lower among females as compared to males in both rural and urban India. For males it was 10% while its was 4% for female in the rural areas, and 42% for male and 40% for female in the urban areas.

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Self-employed scheme for educated unemployed youth (SEEUY)

The scheme for providing Self-employment to Educated Unemployed Youth was started in 1983 with an annual target of 2.5 lakh beneficiaries. Unemployed Youth in the age group of 19-35 years who are Matriculates and above are eligible for assistance under this scheme. ITI passed, women, technically trained persons are given due weightage training plus two levels are given preference. A ceiling of income of Rs. 10,000 per annum, per family, has been fixed for eligibility under the scheme. A minimum of 50% ventures should be through industry-route and not more than 30% of the ventures should relate to business sector, except in hilly areas of the country. A composite loan not exceeding and Rs.15, 000/- for business sector is provided. 25% subsidy is provided by the Govt. on the loans. Banks do not require collateral guarantee or margin money for such loads. 30% of the total beneficiaries are reserved for SC/ST persons.

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Purpose of the study

This study is intended to know the attitude of the graduates towards self-employment and what they are going to do after completing their graduation. Given the importance of the new business start-ups to the economy and society this is the area which is required more attention. To understand more about the students attitude towards selfemployment it is important to know the students career intentions. The decision by an individual to become an entrepreneur depends on the opportunities windows and also the college experience. We know that key attitudes and intentions towards behavior are driven by perception and that can influence an individual their entrepreneurial intentions. Which means entrepreneurial education appears to be of important tool that is available to increase an individuals central attitudes, perceptions and intentions towards self-employment. But now-a-days most of the engineering students are starting up with their own business than management students.

Sample
50 students picked by simple random sampling. Irrespective of their education background.

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Questionnaire Attitude towards self-employment

(*Answer only Q2 & Q3 if you are looking for placement)
1) What do you want to do after completing your studies? a) Study further b) Placement c) Self-employed 2) Which company would you want to work for?

3) What is package you are expecting p.a? a) 1.5-2lacs b) 2-4lacs c) 4-6lacs

d) 6lacs & above

4) Are you sure about the type of business you would like to start?

5) What is the capital you are going to invest?

6) How do you intend to raise the capital?

7) Would you still like to be self-employed when you are offered a handsome pay in a company? a) Yes b) No

8) What drives you the most to do your own business?

9) What do you think of the people who are working for the MNCs beside an opportunity to own profitable business?

Name:

Gender:

Age:

Contact:

Education:

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