A influência dos antecedentes individuais e contextuais da cognição na intenção empreendedora de estudantes universitários

Abstract

A topic in evidence in the field of entrepreneurship since the early 1990s, entrepreneurial intention attracts the attention of researchers who focus on understanding the elements that trigger entrepreneurial behavior. In the theoretical field, different studies address the entrepreneurial intention, observing the preponderance of the Entrepreneurial Event Model (Shapero,1985) and the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991). Recognizing the act of undertaking as a process that derives, in part, from the cognitive structures of individuals in the contexts in which they are inserted, the research about the elements that influence the elaboration of the entrepreneurial career intention becomes increasingly relevant. From this perspective, the aim of this thesis was to analyze how individual and contextual antecedents of cognition affect entrepreneurial intention among non-entrepreneurial university students. Thus, the relationship between such antecedents and the intention to explore opportunities and start their own business is considered strategic in this research. Empirically, such an analysis was generated from data collected from university students responding to the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey (GUESSS) in 2016 and 2018, at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), accounting for a sample of 2.741 and 2.167 students, respectively. A methodological approach adopted was quantitative, operationalized through exploratory factor analysis, descriptive statistics and multiple regressions from robust methods. When testing all the individual and contextual antecedents included in this thesis, together, the results found entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial competences as the main individual antecedents of the intention to undertake, also showing, among the contextual antecedents, that the subjective norms - family/friends/colleagues have strong explanatory power about the intention to start a business of their own. They also revealed the positive and significant effect of the covariates gender and field of study in relation to entrepreneurial intention, when added to individual and contextual antecedents.