The relationship between entrepreneurial intention and behavior: A meta-analytic review

Abstract

A vibrant literature studying antecedents of entrepreneurial intentions is largely motivated by an often implicit assumption that they will be followed by subsequent entrepreneurial behaviors or actions. A much smaller number of studies actually test this assumption. Their results suggest that while the entrepreneurial intention–behavior relationship is usually present, its strength turns out highly contextual. This meta-analysis intends to integrate and summarize the available research base on the entrepreneurial intention–behavior relationship, assessing the moderating impacts of environmental, demographic and methodological factors. Data from 75 studies (150,703 individuals) were included in the analysis. Our results indicate that the focal relationship is robust across environmental contexts, populations, and methodologies except for the measures used for entrepreneurial behavior, the use of a database compared to collecting new data, and the duration of time between intention and behavior. Additionally, entrepreneurial intentions were found to account for only 17% of the variance in entrepreneurial behaviors as opposed to the commonly expected and cited 37%. Our findings suggest theoretical and methodological considerations for future work aimed at exploring and overcoming the non-trivial intention–behavior gap and we encourage the discovery of cognitive and behavioral factors reinforcing the intention–action translation at different levels of analysis and over time.