Who Needs Entrepreneurial Role Models? Driving Forces of Students’ Cyber-Entrepreneurial Career Intention
Shu-Hsuan Chang 1, Chih-Lien Wang 2 * , Jing-Chuan Lee 2, Li-Chih Yu 3
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1 Department of Industrial Education & Technology, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, TAIWAN2 Graduate Institute of Educational Leadership and Evaluation, Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Tainan, TAIWAN3 E-Learning Center, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, TAIWAN* Corresponding Author

Abstract

Cyber-entrepreneurship has become an important topic of debate in academia primarily because of an increasingly competitive nature of E-commerce industry and internet. Since cyber-entrepreneurial career-decision encompasses higher degree of personal risks and commitments among those aspiring to become ‘cyber-entrepreneurs’, there is need for in-depth understanding on the driving factors that influencing Cyber-entrepreneurial intentions. By integrating the concepts of social cognitive theory and goal-setting theory, the current research aims to explore the effects of Cyber-entrepreneurial self-efficacy (CESE) and goal commitment (GC) on Cyber-entrepreneurial intentions (CEIs) in the context of undergraduate entrepreneurship education, and inquires whether the presence of entrepreneurial role models (ERMs) has any effect on the CEIs among undergraduates. Structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis were used to analyze the data collected from 279 undergraduate students from several universities in Taiwan—among which 146 were with entrepreneurial role models and 143 were without. The results showed that GC has a partial mediation effect between CESE and CEI only in the cases of students without ERMs. Multi-sample SEM revealed a significant difference between the effects of CESE on CEI in students with and without ERMs. These findings may have important theoretical and practical implications to students undertaking entrepreneurship degrees and those making leap-decisions to enter the cyber-entrepreneurial field.

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Research Article

EURASIA J Math Sci Tech Ed, 2018, Volume 14, Issue 7, 3083-3098

https://doi.org/10.29333/ejmste/91625

Publication date: 13 May 2018

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