The Factors Shaping Entrepreneurial Intentions

This book is a combination of chapters exploring the entrepreneurial attributes of university students and specifically their intentions to become entrepreneurs. It provides detailed insights into the personal and environmental factors that affect university students' decisions to establish their own businesses. The first six chapters explore these factors through an exploratory approach and provide descriptive data on students' entrepreneurial attributes such as self-regulation, self-efficacy, skills, metacognition (knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition) and subjective and social norms of entrepreneurship. In these chapters, the authors provide an overall picture of entrepreneurial attributes among students from both public and private universities. The last three chapters examine students' entrepreneurial intentions using the Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) techniques. The chapters explain the interactions between personal (attitudes toward entrepreneurship and self-efficacy) and environmental (social and family norms and education) factors, and investigate how these factors affect students' entrepreneurial career choice.This book will be of great importance to, and helpful for, policy makers who wish to develop entrepreneurial activities and quality entrepreneurs in their countries; educators who intend to develop entrepreneurship education and training programs and improve entrepreneurial knowledge and competencies among students; and entrepreneurship teachers and lecturers who endeavour to develop students' entrepreneurial knowledge and competencies. It will also be of interest to students who wish to regulate their motivation, knowledge and thoughts towards learning entrepreneurship; real and nascent entrepreneurs who want to better understand how they can learn entrepreneurial knowledge and skills; and researchers who aim to conduct studies on entrepreneurial attributes and intentions, particularly among students.

Professor Zaidatol Akmaliah Lope Pihie is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Educational Studies at the University Putra Malaysia. She has been involved in teaching and conducting research on various areas of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education and educational leadership since 1981. She has published many papers on developing entrepreneurial attributes, competencies and skills specifically among university students. She has also published several books on business education, educational leadership and entrepreneurial intentions.Afsaneh Bagheri is a Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Entrepreneurship at the University of Tehran. She obtained her PhD in Educational Administration with a concentration on entrepreneurial leadership from the Faculty of Educational Studies at the University Putra Malaysia. She has published several articles on developing students’ entrepreneurial leadership competencies, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, entrepreneurial intention, and entrepreneurial learning and teachers’ entrepreneurial self-efficacy.