How Gender Moderates the Mechanism across Social Experience, Self-referent Beliefs, and SE Intention

Abstract

This study aims to understand how social experience influences social entrepreneurial (SE) intentions through different types of self-referent beliefs, and how gender affects this mechanism. To test our conceptual model, we conducted an online survey and recruited respondents via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Our analysis is based on 743 responses. We used structural equation modeling to test the main hypotheses, conducted decomposition tests using the bootstrapping method to test mediation effects through self-referent beliefs, and executed multi-group analyses to examine gender-moderated mediation effects. The results confirm that social experience significantly influences all three types of self-referent beliefs (entrepreneurial self-efficacy, SE self-efficacy, and self-esteem). Furthermore, the mediating relationship across social experience, self-referent beliefs, and SE intentions is moderated by gender, as the relationship is stronger for women than for men. A clear gender gap exists in the relationships between the perceptual variables and attitudes towards social entrepreneurship. This study reveals gender differences in the mediating mechanism across social experience, self-referent beliefs, and SE intentions. This study also provides a practical suggestion to reduce the perceptual gender gap by showing that social experience more effectively enhances self-referent beliefs (self-efficacy and self-esteem) for women. Our findings support and extend Milliken’s (1987) framing of three distinct types of uncertainty to explain how individuals form SE intentions.