Exploring Relationship between Personality, Creativity and Entrepreneurship: Empirical Evidence from an Agricultural Students Survey in Taiwan

Abstract

The scarcity of young farmers is a severe structural problem encountered in small- scale agricultural countries. How to encourage agricultural students entering into farming career is becoming a political priority for agricultural policy. Previous studies suggested that a proactive entrepreneurship is regarded as an important driver for business expansion in rural areas. Agriculture-related social enterprises are seen as a crucial solution to the challenges faced and have gradually become part of mainstream business in rural areas. However, there is limited research available on individual traits and factors that affect students’ intentions to set-up agri-business with the pursuit of a social and/or environmental contribution. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of personality traits and creativity factors of university students on their social entrepreneurship. A survey was designed to measure social entrepreneurial intentions as dependent variable as well as personality traits and creative ability as explanatory variables. A face-to-face interview was conducted and targeted the students in two national universities and followed a systematic sampling scheme, during October and November 2017. A total of 585 respondents were obtained. A structural equation modelling was used to examine causal relationships among latent variables. The results show that social entrepreneurship is positively influenced by personality traits of agricultural students directly. However, creative ability does not have a direct impact on entrepreneurial intentions significantly. Our results reveal that the creativity is mediated by personality traits and affects social entrepreneurship intention indirectly. This study contributes to a better understanding of structural relationship between personality, creativity and social entrepreneurship by developing and testing a structure model. The main policy implication of this study can be inferred. In addition to professional creativity courses, we suggest that educators and policy makers with respect to entrepreneurship education need to pay more attention on the general education courses related to personality re-shaping. To enhance extraversion, emotional stability and openness of personality traits may serve agricultural students better to engage in social entrepreneurship after their graduation.