The Theory Of Planned Behaviour And The Impact Of Past Behaviour

Abstract

The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) has since its development some 20 years ago proved to be a powerful approach to explain human behaviour. It has been successfully applied to a wide range of behaviours. Interestingly, it is in particular complex behaviour such as managerial decision making which saw only a few attempts to use TPB. This is in particular true for company internationalisation. While the main elements of the theory are generally accepted, it has been suggested at many occasions that the model would benefit by the inclusion of more constructs in terms of explanatory quality. Among the elements proposed, Past Behaviour is of particular importance. Although being vividly discussed, researchers did not come to a definitive judgement on whether or not the construct really should be integrated as an independent factor. The paper at hand adresses these issues by developping a framework for an extended TPB which should be relevant in particular for complex behaviours such as International Entrepreneurship. It is based on an extensive literature review which identifies two main lines of research in terms of Past Behaviour. Using a decomposition approach to integrate Past Behaviour, the shortcomings of earlier approaches are avoided. The framework features a second contribution by explicitly modelling information processing modes, which are proposed to influence development of intentions.