Entrepreneurial Intentions among University Students: The Moderating Role of Creativity

• Date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12386
• Published date: 01 June 2020

Entrepreneurial Intentions among University

Students: The Moderating Role of Creativity

MONTSERRAT ENTRIALGO

1,2

and VÍCTOR IGLESIAS

3

1

Business Administration, University of Oviedo, Oviedo, CountrySpain

2

Universityof Oviedo, Facultad de Comercio,Turismo y CienciasSociales Jovellanos, Laboral- C/Luis Moya Blanco, 26133203,

Gijón, Spain

3

Facultad de Economía y Empresa, Avenida del Cristo s/n, 33071, Oviedo, Spain

Many institutions have carried out different policies to promote entrepreneurship as a way to stimulate economic

development. However, educational policies and stimulus for entrepreneurship do not produce the same effects on

different people. This is a source of inefficiencies. The aim of this paper is to deepen into the analysis of the effects

of one key personal characteristic on entrepreneurial behavior: creativity. We analyze the effects of creativity on

the generation of entrepreneurial intentions. A moderation analysis was conducted on data obtained from a final

sample of 502 undergraduate students. The results indicated that the creativity not only has direct influence on

attitudes and perceived control but that it also has a positive moderating effect on the influence of attitudes on

entrepreneurial intentions. These results highlight the relevance of the interactive effects of personal characteristics

on entrepreneurial behaviors. Several implications for entrepreneurshipeducation have been drawn from thisstudy.

Keywords: entrepreneurship; academic institutions; creativity

Introduction

The topic of entrepreneurial intentions is a well-

established area of research in the field of

entrepreneurship. Numerous works have highlighted the

relevance of models based on intentions to explain

entrepreneurial behavior (Krueger et al., 2000; Liñán &

Chen, 2009). The models that have been extensively

applied to the study of entrepreneurial intention are the

Shapero and Sokol (1982), and the Ajzen’s (1991) theory

of planned behavior (TPB) (Hu et al., 2018, Nabi et al.,

2018). In addition, more recently, works on motivation

theory in the organizational behaviour literature have

explored the close relationship between intention models

and the Expectancy Theory (Fitzsimmons & Douglas,

2011; Barba-Sánchez & A tienza-Sahuquillo, 2017 ). While

these models overlap to a large extent, the TPB model is

the predominant model (Fayolle & Liñán, 2014; Ramos-

Rodríguez et al., 2019); it has been used in a greater

number of works across different disciplines (Pérez-

Macías et al., 2019; Padilla-Angulo, 2019), allowing

researchers to compareand validate the results (Armitage

& Conner, 2001; Sheeran, 2002), and it has shown its

relevance and robustness in predicting entrepreneurial

intentions and behavior (Kautonen et al., 2013).

According to this model, entrepreneurial intentions are

determined by the attitude toward entrepreneurship,

perceivedbehavioral control (PBC),and subjective norms.

However, these models are not able to explain a

relevant part of the variance of the entrepreneurial

intentions variable. In part, this may be because potential

entrepreneurs do not follow a single pre-established path

toward the decision to create a company (Lichtenstein

et al., 2007). They face this complex decision (Stone &

Brush, 1996; Busenitz & Barney, 1997; Alvarez &

Barney, 2005) in different ways, depending on their

different cognitive mechanisms, which are the key to the

process of obtaining, storing, transforming, and

interpreting information and finally making a decision

(Baron, 2004).

Thus, researchers in this area have pointed to the need

to use cognitive approaches, complementary to theories

based on behavior, to advance the understanding of the

determinants of entrepreneurial intentions (Fayolle &

Liñán, 2014; Fuller et al., 2018; Liguori et al., 2018).

Hence, an interest in analyzing the influence of personal-

level variables on the development of the cognitive

processes that lead to the formation of intentions has

Correspondence: Montserrat Entrialgo, Business Administration, :

Universityof Oviedo, Oviedo, Spain.E-mail mentrial@uniovi.es

European Management Review, Vol. 17, 529–542, (2020)

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12386

©2020 European Academy of Management