The value of knowing what you want: Goal hierarchy and entrepreneurial intentions

Abstract

Contrary to common hopes and expectations, recent studies dispute the positive relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intentions. An alternative view is that entrepreneurship education has a ‘sorting effect’, whereby students become more convinced about whether entrepreneurship is appropriate for them or not. Building on goal-setting theory, this study aims to shed more light on the underlying cognitive mechanism of the sorting effect by investigating whether individuals, who exhibit high ‘motivational self-knowledge’ – MSK (i.e. awareness of personal life goals and motives), make more pronounced decisions for or against entrepreneurship. At the same time, we evaluate whether entrepreneurship courses help build professional identity in the sense that motivational self-knowledge increases during the course. Our results show a positive relationship between MSK and the variance in entrepreneurial intentions; particularly when using a higher threshold for ‘high’ MSK. This finding supports the idea that goal hierarchy can be a valuable addition to dominant intention-models in studies on the formation of entrepreneurial intentions. Unfortunately, there is no significant increase in MSK for entrepreneurship students. Considering the benefits of MSK regardless of career choice, this is disappointing. We discuss possible explanations with suggestions for practitioners and formulate directions for future research.