Abstract:

The aim of this paper was to examine and describe the entrepreneurial intention of students, predominantly of humanities and social sciences, and to check the extent to which their expressed entrepreneurial intention can be explained by assessing their own enterprise and personality dimensions. The theory of planned behavior was used to operationalize entrepreneurial intention. The theoretical model of planned behavior is useful because it makes a connection between beliefs and behaviors. In other words, expressed attitudes toward behavior, assessment of social norms and perceived control of behavior together shape the behavioral intention – in our case, the entrepreneurial intention.

For the purposes of this research we made a survey questionnaire made up of several instruments, including the Attitudes to Enterprise Test (Athayde, R., 2009); Entrepreneurial Intention Questionnaire (EIQ; Liñán et al., 2008) and the Croatian version of the IPIP 50 personality questionnaire. The survey respondents were the students of the first year of graduate studies at the University of Zadar. The research results show that students have expressed a moderately positive entrepreneurial intention and that it is correlated to the assessment of their personal enterprise as a broader way to measure how students perceive themselves in the context of their studies and being a student. Furthermore, we found statistically significant correlations between entrepreneurial intention and four broad personality dimensions (Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Intellect), while we found no statistically significant correlation for the dimension of comfort (Agreeableness). While checking the individual predictor traits of the Big Five personality dimensions in explaining entrepreneurial intent, only the Conscientiousness dimension was identified as having the relevant predictor trait. The results of this research are partly in line with previous studies. In other words, they confirm that conscientiousness contributes to an entrepreneurial intention. On the other hand, this research helps us understand how humanities and social sciences students, who traditionally don’t have entrepreneurship and enterprise in the focus of the qualification they create, value entrepreneurial intent and produce results that can be compared in studies performed on similar samples or samples of respondents with an initial non-economic higher education.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurial Intention, Theory of Planned Behavior, Big Five Personality Traits, Attitudes to Enterprise, Students, Higher Education.