Entrepreneurial Intention of Non-Business Students: The Influence of Social Intelligence, Education, and Motivation

Abstract

In Malaysia, entrepreneurship has been viewed as one of the active economic activities, which could boost the growth of nation and develop the individuals. The Ministry of Higher Education of Malaysia has made entrepreneurial modules as compulsory in some of the Malaysian universities to influence the thinking of students in the field of entrepreneurship. However, although such effort was implemented, the interest in entrepreneurship among Malaysian students is still low, where most of them prefer to be job seeker or employee instead of job creator. To support the creation of new venture among nascent entrepreneur, entrepreneurship education is viewed as crucial element that can encourage this happening which could help to reduce unemployment rate. Although several past studies have been conducted to examine the effect of entrepreneurship education, the inconsistencies of the results had caused confusion to readers. Furthermore, the impact of social intelligence could be one of the crucial variables to be studied to predict the entrepreneurial intention among the students. Entrepreneurial motivation is a process that encouraging oneself to boost entrepreneurial intention with the help of either external or internal factor. It is believed that entrepreneurial motivation could contribute to higher attainment of personal needs, satisfaction in business, and eliminating negative emotions in an enterprise. Most of the past studies focused on the investigation of entrepreneurial intention among business and management students only, neglecting those non-business students which caused a research gap here. Due to the problem statement above, this study intended to include potential mediator to explain the indirect relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intention among the students. To do this, we expanded the theory of entrepreneurship education entrepreneurial intentions to incorporating entrepreneurship education social intelligence entrepreneurs' motivation entrepreneurial intentions. The study collects data using online questionnaire and explore the contributions of entrepreneurship education, social intelligence, entrepreneurship motivation to predicting entrepreneurship Intentions among 50 non-business students in a leading Malaysian city. The major findings of this study revealed that there is a significant impact of entrepreneurial education (EE) on entrepreneurial intention (EI) among the university students, but no significant impact was found between social intelligence (SI) and entrepreneurial intention (EI). Entrepreneurial motivation was found significantly mediated the relationship between EE and EI but did not significantly mediate the relationship between SI and EI. Some implications could be provided to policy makers and academicians. Our results show that policy makers should develop political initiatives that promote entrepreneurship programs, at least among those students who do not have entrepreneurial training. As for academicians, this study could improve the direct relationship of education entrepreneurial intention by including Entrepreneurship Motivation as mediator.