Personal Attitude, Perceived Behavioral Control, Social Norm and Entrepreneurial Self-Identity as Entrepreneurial Intention Antecedents

Abstract

Since the central role that entrepreneurship plays in fostering country economies, the recent literature focused on a quest to determine the key factors responsible for the developing of entrepreneurial intention in youngers. Many scholars suggested that the entrepreneurial behavior could be explained and predicted accordingly to the theory of planned behavior (TPB), as proposed by Ajzen (1991). Some studies about TPB - aimed to introduce more variables in order to higher the amount of variance explained by the TPB model - provided interesting insights about the role of self-identity perception as an antecedent of entrepreneurial intention. OBJECTIVE: Following these hints, we propose that the behavioral intention antecedents proposed by the TPB, namely an individual personal attitude (PA), social norms (SN), perceived behavioral control (PBC), and entrepreneurial self-identity (ESI) can have a significant impact on entrepreneurial intentions (EI) of college students and graduates. METHOD: A sevenpoint Likert scale questionnaire has been administered to graduates and students from University of Palermo (N=153). Scales descriptive statistics, reliability analysis and three steps hierarchical regression analysis (HRA) controlled for some demographic variables has been performed in order to test the research hypotheses. The Cronbach‟s Alpha values of questionnaire scales were more than acceptable. RESULTS: The three steps HRA partially confirmed the research hypotheses. On one hand, the hypotheses that personal attitude towards entrepreneurship - introduced in the second step of HRA - and entrepreneurial self-identity - introduced in the third step of HRA - are two strong entrepreneurial intention antecedents are fully confirmed. On the other hand, while PBC showed a strong effect on EI in the second step of HRA, when ESI were entered in the third step of HRA such effect on EI reduced greatly, whereas SN shown no significant effect on EI both in second and third step of HRA. These results seem to indicate that the entrepreneurial self-identity take over PBC when EI is the dependent variable and that SN doesn‟t have a significant effect on entrepreneurial intention. DISCUSSION: The findings of this study are discussed, with a particular attention to the unexpected weak or no significant effect of PBC and SN on entrepreneurial intention and its implication for further researches on entrepreneurial behavior. Finally, the idiosyncrasy of entrepreneurial career as research field that could exhibits some peculiarities about the causal relationship between the three components of the TPB and behavioral intentions are analyzed.