Can Sense of Opportunity Identification Efficacy Play a Mediating Role? Relationship Between Network Embeddedness and Social Entrepreneurial Intention of University Students.

Yingkai Tang,Tao Zheng,Yao Liu,Jing Liu,Wenke Wang,Haiyue Liu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01342

Yingkai Tang, Tao Zheng + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01342

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Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is an entrepreneurial activity centering on solving social problems and creating social values, which can effectively alleviate the problems of sustainable development such as an excessive gap between the rich and the poor, a lack of resources and so on, and can resolve the “triple failures” of government, the market and public welfare departments to a certain extent. As the subjective attitude of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial intention can predict a representational incidence rate of entrepreneurial behavior. Therefore, aimed at university students, a special group of entrepreneurs, this paper constructs a theoretical framework of “network embeddedness – sense of opportunity identification efficacy – university students’ social entrepreneurial intention” from the perspective of social cognitive theory through 466 pieces of valid survey data, and uses Stata 14 to construct a multiple linear regression model to explore the mechanism of action between the three. The results show that university students’ sense of opportunity identification efficacy can significantly and positively stimulate their social entrepreneurial intention, and the network embeddedness (network scale and network intensity) of entrepreneurs is also significantly and positively correlated with their sense of opportunity identification efficacy; however, via the hierarchical regression model, it was found that the sense of opportunity identification efficacy can only partially mediate the relationship between network embeddedness and university students’ social entrepreneurial intention, which is mainly manifested in the positive correlation between university students’ social entrepreneurial intention and their network scale, and is unrelated to network intensity. This research contributes to enriching the theory of social entrepreneurial intention and guides the strengthening of university students’ social entrepreneurial intention in reality.

Highlights

The continuing expansion of enrollment in universities sees a progressive increase of university graduates every year; the continuing downward trend of economic growth has added increasing pressure on graduates in their search for employment
The results show that there is a significant positive correlation between the sense of opportunity identification efficacy and the social entrepreneurial intention of university students (r = 0.6390∗), and the two dimensions of network embeddedness are a significantly positive correlation with the sense of opportunity identification efficacy, which preliminarily verifies the assumptions H1, H2a, and H2b mentioned above
The results show that after adding explanatory variables, the revised R2 increases from 0.029 to 0.419, with a significant positive correlation between the sense of opportunity identification efficacy and university students’ social entrepreneurial intention (β = 0.777∗∗∗), which indicates that the higher the sense of opportunity identification efficacy of entrepreneurs, the stronger the social entrepreneurial intention, assuming H1 is satisfied

Summary

Introduction

The continuing expansion of enrollment in universities sees a progressive increase of university graduates every year; the continuing downward trend of economic growth has added increasing pressure on graduates in their search for employment. Entrepreneurship has become a popular method for university graduates when facing fierce social competition and the considerable pressure to find employment. This paper will focus primarily on one of the paths university students take in entrepreneurial behavior: the subdivision of social entrepreneurship. It is a social opportunity that can satisfy social entrepreneurs that are not satisfied by commercial enterprises or through traditional government and public welfare means (Jin and Liu, 2015). It can play a greater role in alleviating modern social problems such as resource shortages and environmental pollution (Austin et al, 2012). Entrepreneurial intention is considered as the best predictor of entrepreneurs’ potential entrepreneurial behavior, and is a subjective attitude expression of entrepreneurs’ willingness to engage in entrepreneurial activities (Krueger and Carsrud, 1993; Mu, 2007), the prediction and promotion of the transformation rate of entrepreneurial behavior can be realized through research on university students’ social entrepreneurial intention

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