Empathy and University Students' Business Startups: The Moderating Role of Experiential Learning

Abstract

Many universities in developing economies are now recognising the role of the university in entrepreneurship education and development of key entrepreneurial skills by students. Consequently many universities in these nations are expanding the curriculum contents of entrepreneurship courses and training to help students develop these key skills. As a student entrepreneur it is important that students are taught the capabilities of instantly thinking outside the box which also involves empathising in order to visualize the various outcomes. Often from these challenges a student entrepreneur can take advantage of opportunities, if they are taught how to engage empathy to clearly see them. Therefore, the goal of this paper was to examine the influence of empathy among university students as a determinant of creation of successful and innovative students' start-ups. The moderating role of experiential learning was also assessed. To achieve this goal, a sample size of 357 students of Covenant University in Nigeria, was used. The data collected were analysed by means of regression analysis and Hayes process macro. The result showed that empathy has positive significant effect on students' start-ups among university students (p < 0.05) and experiential learning moderated the relationship between empathy and students start-ups among university students. Based on the findings the study concluded that university managers and other stakeholders in developing countries may expand entrepreneurship training and education curriculum contents based on the development of empathy as an entrepreneurial skill. The findings also indicated that that moderate levels of experiential learning activities are required to achieve best results. Therefore, university managers and other stakeholders may expand the curriculum of entrepreneurship training and education regimes to cover the development of empathy as an entrepreneurial skill. It is important to state that empathy is an entrepreneurial skill that can be developed hence, teaching empathy as a theme targeted at the creation of creative start-ups is considered favourable in this regard.