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of a large corporation or the owner-manager of a smaller firm. The immediate financial rewards of both were more or less the same. Which option would you choose?
As Table 8 indicates, nearly two-thirds of those who indicated a preference chose to become owners.
This pattern of choice might be considered as natural if all of the respondents were owners themselves. It is logical to assume that a process of selective recruitment to the entrepreneurial role is at work, i.e., individuals who have the early ambition to be their own boss will try harder and thus have a greater chance to attain that goal. Fortunately, among my sample there were persons who derived their income mainly from salary and not profit. I shall call these non-proprietary directors as distinct from owner-directors. By non-proprietary I mean that these directors had been appointed directors before they held any company shares in their name, and that any shares they might possess subsequently were less than the average holding of individual shareholders. Eleven of the respondents, or a quarter of the sample, fell within this category. With such a distinction, we can pursue the question of selective recruitment. Did non-proprietary directors tend to favour salaried employment while owner-directors would choose to be self-employed? Table 9 demonstrates that this was not the case. There is no significant correlation between the employment status of the respondent and his preference for independent ownership.
Table 8: Hong Kong Cotton Spinners' Preferences for Employment Status
Choice Number Percentage Owner-manager 21 62 Senior executive 11 32 No preference 2 6 No answer 6 TOTAL 40 100Source: Interviews, 1978.