Abstract:

Growing interest in the development of entrepreneurial intentions (EI) has increased the importance of theories that explain and expect individuals’ tendency to start a new business. However, most of those theories focus on the relationship between the entrepreneur’s perceptions and entrepreneur’s intention and ignore the entrepreneur’s personality characteristics (cognitive and psychological) that might configure the entrepreneur’s perceptions. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to integrate the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the entrepreneurial event model (EEM) and to extend the combined model to include the entrepreneur’s personality characteristics that might shape the entrepreneurial perceptions and intentions. The results demonstrate the relevance and robustness of the suggested combined and extended model in the prediction of senior university students entrepreneurship intentions (explained variance=73.3%) based on survey data (2016; n = 688). The paper discusses conceptual and methodological issues related to studying the personality characteristics-perceptions- intention relationships and outlines avenues for future research.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurial Intention, TPB, EEM, Personality, UAE.