An Assessment of Social Entrepreneurial Intention of Students in the Tourism Industry: A Focus on the Educational Role of Universities

One of the salient approaches in the literature to explain and analyze entrepreneurial behaviors includes intention models. Of the various factors introduced in intention models, this study takes into account four psychological internal factors including entrepreneurial intention, self-efficacy, cultural empathy, and attitude. On the other hand, the study considers the external factor of entrepreneurial education. So, the main purpose of this study is to make an inquiry about interrelationships between the above variables to understand whether and to some extent they affect each other. This will finally lead to the formulation of strategies aiming at developing the entrepreneurial intention of students. The statistical population of the research includes doctoral and Master students studying tourism related majors or working in a tourism-related sector. The study method to analyze the interrelationships among the above variables is structural equation modeling with the partial least squares approach. In this respect, measurement and structural models were assessed, respectively. The results obtained indicate that the hypotheses referring to as the positive relationships between empathy and intention and on the other hand, empathy and attitude were rejected. In fact, having empathy skills will not lead to an entrepreneurial intention or to the improvement of attitudes towards entrepreneurship. Furthermore, it was found that education exerts a significant great impact on students to make entrepreneurial intentions in that its total effect was far beyond self-efficacy, attitude, and empathy. Based on this result, it is suggested to include social entrepreneurial subject in the tourism related students’ curriculum.