Passion

Common Method Bias

Harman's single factor test revealed that a single factor explains 48.6 per cent of the variance, which is less than 50 percent, suggesting that common method bias is not a concern for this study.

Demographic Charactesistics of Respondents

Only 18.4% of respondents were younger than 40 years old. This reflects the trend of young people, especially young women, leaving rural areas in Australia. A total of 85% of respondents possessed post-secondary school qualifications, including 52.5% of women possessing either a post-graduate diploma (14.1%) or postgraduate degree (38.4%). More than two-thirds of those surveyed were the sole proprietors of their businesses. A third of the businesses owned by respondents were family-owned. More than two-thirds of those surveyed said their businesses had no employees other than the owner(s). At least 44% of business were more than three years old, and 31% of businesses were under a year old. Nearly 37% of respondents reported that their business made a profit in the last fiscal year. Additionally, 77% of the respondents reported that they have a network of entrepreneurial friends/colleagues with whom to discuss their excitement and concerns related to their entrepreneurial vision.

Measurement Model

The measurement model is the component of the PLS model that investigates the relationship between latent variables and their measures. Prior to structural modelling of latent variables, it was necessary to evaluate the measurement model for its quality (reliability and validity). The results below demonstrate the quality of the measurement model.

As shown in Table 1, all factor loadings are greater than the threshold value of 0.6. The Cronbach's alpha and composite reliability (CR) were higher than the recommended value of 0.700. Cronbach's alpha of each construct exceeded the 0.700 thresholds. These values ascertained the reliability of the measurements. Convergent validity was acceptable because the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) was over 0.500. Results established discriminant validity (shown in Table 2) as the square root of the AVEs was higher than the inter-construct correlations among the constructs. Discriminant validity was confirmed by the Heterotriat-Monotrait ratio of correlation with values below the threshold of 0.90; hence, discriminant validity was established (see Table 2). These findings established the validity of measurement.

Table 1. Factor Loadings, Reliability, and Validity.

Table 2. Fornell-Larcker criterion and Hetrotrait-Monotrait Ratio.

Structural Model

After assurance of our measurement quality, we assessed the structural model to test our hypothesis. Table 3 shows the results of the structural model (Figure 1) assessment using 5000 bootstrap samples. The results indicate that entrepreneurial leadership intention had a positive and significantly relationship with both entrepreneurial passion (β = 0.429, T = 4.064, p = 0.000) and venture growth intention (β = 0.636, T = 7.203, p = 0.000). This finding gave us the evidence to accept the hypotheses H1 and H2. However, entrepreneurial passion had a positive but non-significant relationship with venture growth intention (β = 0.018, T = 0.186, p = 0.853). This finding suggested that the evidence was not sufficient to support our hypothesis H3. To ascertain these results from the model, we assessed the model's explanatory capacity and effect size of independent variables on dependent variables and their predictive relevance as follows:

Figure 1. Structural Model.

Table 3. Structural model evaluation.

The R2 value, the explained variance of the dependent constructs, was used to assess the structural model's explanatory capacity. R2 values for entrepreneurial passion and venture growth intention were 0.184 and 0.415, respectively, above the acceptable value of 0.10.

After the proposed model had been evaluated and confirmed, the next step was to see how removing a specific predictor construct affected the R2 value of an endogenous construct. As a result, we investigated the magnitude of the effects (f²;). On the one hand, expert user results showed that Entrepreneurial Leader Identity had a large effect size on venture growth intention (f² = 0.563) and a moderate effect size on entrepreneurial passion (f² = 0.226). On the other hand, passion had a nonsignificant impact on intention (f² = 0.000).

Finally, the current study tested the model's predictive relevance using Stone–Geisser's Q2. The results showed that all Q2 values were above zero (see Table 3), indicating that the models had predictive relevance.