Social environment and entrepreneurial intentions among college students: the mediated effect of proactive personality

Entrepreneurial intention is associated with both students’ social environments and individual characteristics, but their connection is not yet fully discussed. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we take university support, family background, and peer influence into a social-environment framework and examine the mediating role of proactive personality. We use data from 1,058 university students surveyed in China and apply partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the proposed relationships.

The results show that university support, family background, and peer influence are all positively associated with entrepreneurial intention. They are also positively related to proactive personality. Proactive personality partially mediates the relationship between each social-environment dimension and entrepreneurial intention, while the direct relationships remain significant.

The results further show that the three social environments are related but do not operate in exactly the same way. Overall, this research connects social context and individual characteristics within one framework and provides a more integrated explanation of how university students form entrepreneurial career intentions. We express our sincere gratitude to the participants who facilitated and supported the data collection.

This study was funded by the Applied Research Project of the Technical Skills Innovation Service Platform of Anhui Business College (2022ZDG03) and the Anhui provincial quality engineering teaching research project (2022JYXM560). School of Accounting, Anhui University of Applied Sciences, Wuhu, Anhui, China School of Economics and Management, Anhui Normal University, Wuhu, Anhui, China The authors declare no competing interests. The present research project was assessed and approved by the Anhui Business College.

This study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and Chinese regulations. Ethical standards were maintained throughout the research process. Informed consent was obtained from all the participants.

The participants were required to provide consent for the survey terms, which were clearly outlined at the beginning of the survey. This included information on the study’s purpose voluntary nature of participation, anonymity of responses, and how the data would be used. Once consent was obtained, participants answered the questions.