Shaping entrepreneurial intention among youngsters in Malaysia

Hasliza Hassan,Muhammad Sabbir Rahman,Abu Bakar Sade

doi:10.1108/jhass-02-2020-0029

Abstract

PurposeEntrepreneurship is one of the engines to stimulate socio-economic development. This study aims to examine the relationships of entrepreneurship education, financial support and market availability, with the entrepreneurial attitude among youngsters in venturing into entrepreneurship. A further discovery concerning the relationship between entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurial intention is also analysed.Design/methodology/approachData were collected through a survey questionnaire that was distributed to university students. A total of 425 collected data were analysed using structural equation modelling to discover the relationship among five chosen constructs.FindingsIt was found that entrepreneurship education and financial support encourage the entrepreneurial attitude of youngsters to venture into entrepreneurship. This entrepreneurial attitude is further supported by an entrepreneurial intention to become an entrepreneur. Nevertheless, market availability does not influence the youngsters to venture into entrepreneurship.Practical implicationsEntrepreneurship encouragement should focus on the entrepreneurship education and financial support to shape the entrepreneurial attitude, which, indirectly, may further influence the entrepreneurial intention.Originality/valueAs an initiative to become an entrepreneurial nation, there is a need to discover how to shape the entrepreneurial intention through entrepreneurial attitude. This study is assisting to fill the research gap by focussing on the Malaysian market.

Highlights

Entrepreneurship is characterized by the new venture creation process (Kloepfer and Castrogiovanni, 2018)
Because of the significance of entrepreneurship, this research aims to discover the entrepreneurial intention through entrepreneurial attitude, which is based on entrepreneurship education, financial support and market availability
There is a significant relationship between entrepreneurship education and the entrepreneurial attitude to venture into entrepreneurship

Summary

Introduction

Entrepreneurship is characterized by the new venture creation process (Kloepfer and Castrogiovanni, 2018). Formerly, entrepreneurship was not perceived as a preferred career profession, and, even up until the late 1970s, the majority of young graduates preferred to work in the government sector. It was the Privatization Policy, which was introduced in 1983 (Public Private Partnership Unit, 2019) that subsequently encouraged graduates to participate in the private corporate sector as a career. The AVE for entrepreneurship education, financial support, market availability, entrepreneurial attitude and entrepreneurial intention is 0.792, 0.687, 0.797, 0.679 and 0.805, respectively. The values for the composite reliability (CR) for entrepreneurship education (0.958), financial support (0.929), market availability (0.959), entrepreneurial attitude (0.927) and entrepreneurial intention (0.961) are slightly high at more than 0.9.

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion