Designing and Testing a Model of Antecedents of Students’ Entrepreneurial Behavior Intention: The Mediating Role of Perceived Fear and the Moderating Role of Gender

Nowadays, entrepreneurship is considered as one of the most crucial topics and the main driving force in the economic development of the countries. The purpose of the current research was to design and test a model of the antecedents of students' entrepreneurial behavior intention with the mediation role of perceived fear and the moderating role of gender.

The present research was a descriptive correlational study. The statistical population of the research included all undergraduate and graduate students of Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, and due to the difficulty of accessing all of them, 367 students were selected through convenience sampling method. For data collection, the Entrepreneurial Inspiration (Souitaris et al., 2007), the Entrepreneurial Mindset (Cui et al., 2021), the Entrepreneurial Intention (Valliere, 2015), and the Perceived Fear Questionnaires (Deniz et al., 2011& Collins, 2007) were used.

The results of research data analysis through structural equation modeling in SmartPLS software showed that entrepreneurial inspiration has a significant positive effect on entrepreneurial thinking (0.634) and on entrepreneurial behavior intention (0.145). Also, entrepreneurial thinking has a significant negative effect on perceived fear (-0.693) and a significant positive effect on entrepreneurial behavior intention (0.397), and perceived fear has a significant negative effect on entrepreneurial behavior intention (-0.326). in addition, the value of the coefficient of determination showed that about 60% of the variance of entrepreneurial behavior intention is explained through entrepreneurial inspiration, mindset, and perceived fear. The results of investigating indirect hypotheses showed that the relationship between entrepreneurial mindset and entrepreneurial behavior intention through perceived fear is significant, but the relationship between entrepreneurial inspiration and entrepreneurial behavior intention through perceived fear is not significant. In addition, gender moderates the effect of perceived fear on entrepreneurial behavior intention.

The findings indicated that entrepreneurial inspiration directly and indirectly increases students' desire for entrepreneurial behavior through entrepreneurial thinking.