创业教育对创业意向的作用机理研究

Impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention

基于个体感知视角,通过对接受创业教育的个体展开问卷调查研究,考察创业教育和创业自我效能对个体创业意向产生影响的内在机制。研究结果表明:创业教育对创业意向有显著正向影响;计划、搜寻、调拨梳理阶段的创业自我效能在创业教育与创业意向之间发挥完全中介作用,而与人相关和与财务相关执行阶段的创业自我效能并不发挥中介作用。主动性人格正向调节创业教育与计划、搜寻、调拨梳理阶段创业自我效能之间的关系,却对创业教育与执行阶段自我效能之间关系的调节作用并不显著。

Entrepreneurial activities are increasingly regarded as a powerful tool to drive social and economic transformation. As a critical step in promoting entrepreneurial activities, entrepreneurship education has shown a promising trend in recent years in China. The effect of entrepreneurial education on entrepreneurial intention has also been widely discussed. However, the conclusions have not achieved an agreement yet. Some scholars believe that entrepreneurship education plays a positive role in enhancing entrepreneurial intention, while others argue that the positive role of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention is not significant, or even worse, individuals’ entrepreneurial intentions decreased after they received entrepreneurship education. Therefore, whether entrepreneurship education affects entrepreneurial intention and its mechanism is still to be discussed. Our research purpose is to investigate the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention.Most studies measure entrepreneurship education as a dummy variable. However, the degree of perceived entrepreneurship education varies from individuals. To explore the mechanism of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention more deeply and accurately, we measure entrepreneurship education from a perceived perspective.Entrepreneurial self-efficacy has been widely recognized as a critical cognitive factor in the field of entrepreneurship research, and its predictive effect on entrepreneurial intention has attracted more attention. But the majority of research on entrepreneurial self-efficacy in the entrepreneurship education field is in the form of single dimension measurement. It not only limits the depth exploration of entrepreneurial self-efficacy but also is not conducive to the implementation of entrepreneurship education in practice. According to the self-efficacy theory, we explore the mediating role of entrepreneurial self-efficacy in the searching,planning, marshaling,implementing with people and implementing with finance. Whether the effect of entrepreneurship education has been influenced by a proactive personality has not yet reached a consensus. The personality traits of entrepreneurs are classic and controversial research topics in the field of entrepreneurship. The moderating role of proactive personality needs to be analyzed in the relationship with entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial self-efficacy to further clarify the mechanism of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention. Therefore, we examine the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention with a focus on the individual perspective. We explore the mediating role of entrepreneurial self-efficacy in the searching, planning, marshaling, implementing with people and implementing with finance, further examine the moderating role of proactive personality in the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial self-efficacy to clarify the mechanism of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention.We conducted a survey from May to June 2017 to testify to our study. Individuals who received entrepreneurship education were invited to fill out the questionnaires. After eliminating the invalid questionnaires, we finally had 243 samples to do further research.Our results reveal that entrepreneurship education strengthens entrepreneurial intention. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy in searching, planning, marshaling phrase mediate the relationship between entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial intention, while that in implementing with people and finance do not play mediating roles. Proactive personality positively moderates the effect of entrepreneurial education on entrepreneurial self-efficacy in searching, planning, and marshaling, while it does not moderate the relationship between entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial self-efficacy in implementing with people and finance.Our study has some contributions. First, we measure entrepreneurship education from an individual’s perceived perspective to explore the mechanism of entrepreneurship education on the entrepreneurial intention with more detailed and accurate analysis, making a meaningful supplement of entrepreneurial education research. We find that entrepreneurship education has a positive impact on entrepreneurial intention in the Chinese context, which amplifies previous research conclusions.Second, we enrich a deep understanding of the mediating role of entrepreneurial self-efficacy. We find that entrepreneurial self-efficacy in searching, planning, marshaling play mediating roles between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention while entrepreneurial self-efficacy in implementing with people and finance don’t play mediating roles. With a deep understanding of the multi-dimensional measurement of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, our study provides a close view of specific dimension entrepreneurial self-efficacy and explores the different roles in the effect of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention. Furthermore, our result explains the disagreement in the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention. The content of entrepreneurship education may be the critical answer to the disagreement. Courses more related to searching, planning, marshaling will largely contribute to the increase of entrepreneurial intention. Our result contributes to the controversy in mainstream literature.Third, we explore the moderating role of proactive personality in the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. By integrating cognition and personality traits, the mechanism of entrepreneurial education on entrepreneurial intention is fully discussed, and supply the lack in previous researches. We find that both cognition and personality play critical roles in the mechanism.Although our study has made up for the deficiencies of previous studies to some extent, it has some limitations. First, due to the availability of data, we use cross-sectional data to predict the relationship of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial intention. But the subsequent influence of entrepreneurial intention on entrepreneurial behavior still needs to be discussed in future research. The actual proportion of students who become nascent entrepreneurs could be collected to accurately verify the effect of entrepreneurship education. Second, as entrepreneurship education is a comprehensive discipline, evaluating its effect and making sense of its teaching contents and approaches are important and complex topics. In future research, we could evaluate its effectiveness with specific teaching content and pedagogy to see if there is any influence on the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education.