Am I an entrepreneur? Entrepreneurial self-identity as an antecedent of entrepreneurial intention

Ceresia, Francesco; Mendola, Claudio Article Am I an entrepreneur? Entrepreneurial self-identity as an antecedent of entrepreneurial intention Administrative Sciences Provided in Cooperation with: MDPI – Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, Basel Suggested Citation: Ceresia, Francesco; Mendola, Claudio (2020) : Am I an entrepreneur? Entrepreneurial self-identity as an antecedent of entrepreneurial intention, Administrative Sciences, ISSN 2076-3387, MDPI, Basel, Vol. 10, Iss. 3, pp. 1-14, https://doi.org/10.3390/admsci10030046 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/240036 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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Entrepreneurial Self-Identity as an Antecedent of Entrepreneurial Intention Francesco Ceresia *,†and Claudio Mendola † Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Palermo, 90134 Palermo PA, Italy; [email protected] *Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +39-339-232-4611 †These authors contributed equally to this work. Received: 16 June 2020; Accepted: 16 July 2020; Published: 27 July 2020   Abstract: Although many studies have shown that entrepreneurial intention can be explained according to a theory of planned behavior, some scholars have provided interesting insights into the role of entrepreneurial self-identity perception as a significant precursor of entrepreneurial intention. A questionnaire was administered to graduates and students of an Italian university (N =153). A hierarchical regression analysis controlling for demographic variables was performed in order to test the research hypotheses. The findings of this study are discussed, with particular attention paid to the unexpected, weak, or non-significant effects of perceived behavioral control and social norms on entrepreneurial intention. Keywords: entrepreneurship; startups; entrepreneurial intention; entrepreneurial self-identity; planned behavior 1. Introduction Entrepreneurship can be seen as one of the crucial economic factors of a national economy. In fact, the entrepreneurial system of a country grows upon the entrepreneurs’ willingness to develop new ideas and make a breakthrough in developing new technologies—thus registering a patent—and innovate work places in order to stimulate workers’ creativeness (Holcombe 1998; Wennekers and Thurik 1999 ; Samila and Sorenson 2011;Engle et al. 2010;Aidis et al. 2012;Aparicio et al. 2016;Lucas and Fuller 2017). For these reasons, entrepreneurship is mostly regarded as one of the most influential factors able to greatly impact a country’s economic and social growth (Holcombe 1998;Wennekers and Thurik 1999; Samila and Sorenson 2011;Engle et al. 2010;Aidis et al. 2012;Aparicio et al. 2016;Lucas and Fuller 2017). In fact, several nations (e.g., those in the European Union) have increased their efforts in the past few years to create incentives to aid people in starting their own firms (Von Graevenitz and Weber 2010). Many researchers have focused their analysis on cognitive factors capable of fostering entrepreneurship development. The theory of planned behavior (TPB, Ajzen 1991) supports the idea that entrepreneurial behavior can be considered as a highly intentional behavior. Thus, becoming an entrepreneur and managing a firm can be seen as volitional behavior and not as random occurrences in a person’s life (Ajzen 1991;D í az-Garc í a and Jimenez-Moreno 2010;Van Gelderen et al. 2008; Liñán and Chen 2009;Lortie and Castogiovanni 2015;Kautonen et al. 2015;Rauch and Frese 2012). According to the original theorization of the TPB, the behavioral intention (BI) represents the decision to try and the effort committed to performing that particular behavior (Ajzen 1991). The following three individual perceptions act as motivational antecedents of the BI. Higher levels of these three antecedents predict a higher level of BI, which in turn leads the individual to act in this particular way (Ajzen 1991;Krueger et al. 2000): Adm. Sci. 2020,10, 46; doi:10.3390/admsci10030046 www.mdpi.com/journal/admsci Adm. Sci. 2020,10, 46 2 of 14 • Personal attitude (PA), described as one’s positive or negative evaluation of a particular object or behavior; • Perceived behavioral control (PBC), described as how much an individual believes him/herself to be able to behave in a specific way; • Social norms (SN), which reflect the social pressure (coming from several groups of reference people) felt by an individual in pushing her/himself to perform this behavior. The application of the TPB cognitive framework has shown an overall validity across different contexts and has retained its robustness even when applied to different kinds of behavior ( Armitage and Conner 2001 ). In the particular case of the entrepreneurial behavior, the TPB antecedents typically explain 30–45% of the variance in BI (Kautonen et al. 2015). However, BI in practice represents an instrument or intermediate element that serves to anticipate actual behavior (e.g., starting up). For this reason, there is a need to consider additional variables that may contribute to increasing the accuracy in the prediction of BI. Additionally, the strength of the relation between the TPB antecedents and behavioral intention may be enhanced or reduced according to the specific behavior one is analyzing ( Conner and Armitage 1998 ). For example, Armitage and Conner (2001) reported in their meta-analysis how social norms have been labeled in the previous literature on the TPB as the overall weakest antecedent of behavioral intention. In contrast, the effects of social norms on behavioral intention may be context-related, as in the study carried out by Moriano et al. (2012). As a possible explanation for these differences, the use of inadequate measurement instruments has been pointed out, often relying on a single item for evaluation (Armitage and Conner 2001). Alternatively, some people may be more guided by normative beliefs, while others by attitudes and self-efficacy perceptions (Trafimow and Finlay 1996). Finally, the existence of different characteristics associated with specific behaviors justifies the need to test several additional variables with the model, over and above the three original motivational antecedents (Conner and Armitage 1998), in order to overall magnify model validity. Thus, there is a need to adapt the model to the specific target behavior under investigation in order to create a version providing a better fit to the data. The choice to become an entrepreneur can be seen as a decision having a substantial impact on an individual’s life. Therefore, it should reasonable be based on, and in continuity with, self-perceived inner characteristics in order to maintain an individual’s state of cognitive equilibrium or to avoid an unbalanced state between an individual’s thought, feelings, attitudes, and behavior (Heider 1946, 1958). In this sense, self-identity perceptions are the meaningful characteristics an individual uses to describe himself (Liñ á n et al. 2018). They can play a significant role in shaping career-related behavior, serving as one of the bases an individual should comply with when making major life decisions (Saka et al. 2008). Starting from these considerations, this study aimed to test the role of the entrepreneurial self-identity as a significant antecedent of the entrepreneurial intention (EI). To achieve this aim, the model was tested on a group of college students and young graduates in Italy. 2. Theory of Planned Behavior and Entrepreneurial Intention Although much empirical evidence, even from several different countries, supports the idea that entrepreneurial behavior can be studied through the cognitive framework called the “theory of planned behavior” (Engle et al. 2010;Kautonen et al. 2015), its goodness of fit is still a controversial matter. Some scholars underline the need for a methodically accurate study of this model’s application to the entrepreneurial field due to the unreliability of some tools used by scholars in the past to assess entrepreneurial intentions (Liñ á n and Chen 2009). Moreover, Engle et al. (2010) openly reasoned about the possibility of adapting the TPB framework to the country where a study is carried out, given that its power to explain the variance of individuals’ intentions varies greatly from one country to another. Recently, (Lortie and Castogiovanni 2015), in reviewing the literature on the use of the Adm. Sci. 2020,10, 46 3 of 14 TPB in entrepreneurial fields of study, reported that only one research project tried to test the TPB as theorized by Ajzen (1991), whereas the majority of studies used only portions of the model, adapting it to their contextual needs, or else underlined great differences between how much a specific population valued the three antecedents of the TPB in cross-national research, thus obtaining an unstable and inconclusive relation between the three variables and EI. These studies seem to indicate that although entrepreneurial behavior can be considered correlated to following an individual’s intentionality, it might also be characterized by peculiar aspects that make it different from other intentional behaviors. However, for the aim of this study and the particular behavioral intention we want to investigate, we describe the three independent antecedents of the TPB as follows: • Personal attitude (PA) refers to the extent that an entrepreneurship career is deemed as attractive to individual. More deeply, it is linked to the personal positive or negative evaluation that an individual can have about being an entrepreneur (Ajzen 1991;Kautonen et al. 2013; Zhang et al. 2014 ; Miao et al. 2019 ). In the TPB model, PA is greatly influenced by the expected outcomes of a specific course of action (Ajzen 1991). Moreover, in the literature about entrepreneurship, PA is strongly associated with EI (Moriano et al. 2012;Di Paola et al. 2016;) • Perceived behavioral control (PBC) mirrors an individual’s perception of how difficult it would be to become an entrepreneur, especially taking into account his/her perceived skills and knowledge. In fact, PBC can be defined as a mix of perceptions about one’s self-efficacy (Bandura 1986) and behavioral controllability (Liñ á n and Chen 2009). Although PBC has been considered as having a great impact on the development of EI—even receiving empirical support ( Krueger et al. 2000 ; Jung et al. 2001;Engle et al. 2010)—Lortie and Castogiovanni (2015) reported some issues concerning the relation between PBC, EI, and entrepreneurial behavior and advocated the use of robust and valid tools in future studies to appropriately answer this open question; • Social norms (SN) are linked to individual perceived social pressure to behave—or not—in a particular way. As can be easily guessed, an individual’s SN are deeply related to family economic status, his/her education, and political past and present of his/her country. In the entrepreneurial literature, although some authors reported SN as having a trivial impact on the development of EI (Autio et al. 2001;Krueger et al. 2000;Lortie and Castogiovanni 2015), other studies demonstrated that SN can indeed affect the birth and development of EI. For example, Liñ á n and Chen (2009) found out that SN did indirectly affect EI through the moderation of the level of PA and PBC. On the contrary, Kautonen et al. (2015) proved in their study that SN may have a direct effect on EI. Moriano et al. (2012) hypothesized that the weight of SN on EI is greatly influenced by the national culture of the subjects. Individualistic cultures hinder the relation between SN and EI, since in that national environment potential entrepreneurs are more focused on having the right characteristics than on a desire for social acceptance, whereas in collectivist cultures, the thoughts and perceptions of others are taken into great consideration. In light of the above, we hypothesize that: Hypothesis 1a (H1a). A higher level of personal attitude predicts a higher level of entrepreneurial intention. Hypothesis 1b (H1b). A higher level of perceived behavioral control predicts a higher level of entrepreneurial intention. Hypothesis 1c (H1c). A higher level of social norms predicts a higher level of entrepreneurial intention. 3. Theory of Planned Behavior and Perceived Self-Identity in the Entrepreneurial Environment 3.1. Theory of Planned Behavior and Self-Identity Although the application of the TPB in the entrepreneurial field has been supported by past research studies—even if not all the studies found the same results in terms of the relation between Adm. Sci. 2020,10, 46 4 of 14 the three main antecedents and entrepreneurial intention (Liñ á n and Chen 2009;Kautonen et al. 2015; Lortie and Castogiovanni 2015;Obschonka et al. 2015)—some authors have underlined the need to add other variables to intentional antecedents, especially in the entrepreneurial field, in order to increase the ability of the model to account for entrepreneurial intention variance (Conner and Armitage 1998; Pihie and Bagheri 2013;Bagheri and Pihie 2014;Zhang et al. 2014;Ajzen 2015;Baluku et al. 2019). Suggestions have been made to add not only variables linked to the individual’s inner world such as belief, perception of one’s self, and values but also variables related to the individual’s external world, such as ones connected to a particular context, nation, or culture (Rise et al. 2010;Zhang et al. 2014). In the literature about the TPB, the inclusion of self-identity (SI) has been proposed in order to better predict a planned behavior (Conner and Armitage 1998;Rise et al. 2010;Ries et al. 2012). The self-identity construct refers to the socially meaningful categories people utilize to describe themselves and often want to be recognized with. Taking into account this description, SI can be considered as having a great impact on individuals’ choices about which ways they want to behave and be seen by others. It should be noted, though, that this factor is different from the three of the original TPB model since it has different motivational roots (Rise et al. 2010;Carter 2013). More specifically, an individual may choose to behave in a particular way in order to avoid a cognitive dissonance state (Festinger 1957), thus confirming his/her belief (Conger et al. 2012;Obschonka et al. 2012) and self-efficacy perception (Cardon et al. 2009;Brändle et al. 2018). Stets and Burke (2000) advanced the idea that when a specific person’s identity is activated, a process of self-verification occurs; the individual will then behave according to his/her activated identity in order to maintain a sense of equilibrium and consistency. In this sense, we can argue that self-identity possesses different motivational roots from the other TPB antecedents already considered (namely PA, PBC, SN), since the latter guide people to comply with others or to act for instrumental reasons, whereas the former serves to confirm one’s own ideas about oneself (Rise et al. 2010). It seems reasonable to think, at this point, that since intention is the strongest antecedent of planned behavior (Bagozzi et al. 1989;Ajzen 1991), we should find a relation between self-identity and behavioral intention (BI), especially for identity-related behavior such as career-related behavior (Saka et al. 2008). However, the relation between SI and BI has been studied widely with inconclusive results. For example, Fekadu and Kraft (2001) have reported in their study that SI may not have an independent effect on BI, whereas other studies have found a statisticallysignificant impact of SI on BI ( Terry et al. 1999 ; Nigbur et al. 2010). Finally, Smith et al. (2008) showed that self-identity is a powerful antecedent of purchasing behavioral intention—as well as PA, PBC, and SN—and the same results have been found in the study of Carfora et al. (2017) on the antecedents of pro-environment behaviors. Moreover, Ries et al. (2012) confirmed that behavioral intentions and behavioral outcome can indeed be predicted by SI. These results seem in line with the general agreement found in the TPB literature about the inclusion of SI in the TPB cognitive framework as an independent factor that enhances the model’s ability to explain variance in behavioral intention (Hagger and Chatzisarantis 2006;Smith et al. 2008; Fielding et al. 2008;Rise et al. 2010;Carfora et al. 2017). Rise et al. (2010) stated that SI variable should be fully considered as a fundamental addition to the TPB model, since it helps to raise the predictive power of the model by 6% in terms of the explained variance. However, as stated before, the robustness of the TPB across different contexts and situations, both in terms of the sample national culture and the actual behavior taken into account, can vary greatly and is something that should be empirically tested. For these reasons, this study tested the idea that SI can be considered an antecedent of EI. 3.2. Entrepreneurial Self-Identity as an Antecedent of Entrepreneurial Intention The recent literature on entrepreneurship has introduced self-identity perception, i.e., personal characteristics and self’s elements an individual identifies with in order to give significance to context and his/her own behavior, as a variable capable of influencing an entrepreneur’s choices from the Adm. Sci. 2020,10, 46 5 of 14 starting point of her/his firm to the end of his/her company. (Conger et al. 2012;Donnellon et al. 2014; Sieger et al. 2016;Alsos et al. 2016;Brändle et al. 2018;Ceresia and Mendola 2019). Specifically, studies regarding the possible impact of SI on the entrepreneur’s firm-related choices can be divided into two main approaches: one based on the identity control theory (ICT) ( Burke 2004,2007 ) adopted by Conger et al. (2012) and the other based on the social identity theory (SIT) (Tajfel and Turner 1979) proposed by Fauchart and Gruber (2011). Both approaches explain how the entrepreneur’s self-identity perception, especially in economically ambiguous situations, can influence their decision-making process regarding the strategies to be put in place to make a firm flourish, but they differ in their conception of the self-identity variable. The model proposed by Fauchart and Gruber (2011) states that are three qualitatively different kind of identities that an entrepreneur can assume and be categorized with. Based on a match between on his/her social–educational background and three criteria identified by the authors, the principal driving motivational force of the entrepreneur, evaluations about his/her ability or skills, and his/her or others’ expectations he/she wants to meet, an entrepreneur can be a Darwinian entrepreneur, a communitarian entrepreneur, or a missionary entrepreneur. This apparently rigid structure seems to be able to explain entrepreneurial behavior while considering (a) entrepreneur choice of his/her target or client, (b) how much an entrepreneur cares for the wellness of his/her customers, and (c) how much he/she is able to maximize company growth through wise uses of resources and workers’ knowledge (Fauchart and Gruber 2011). The theory of Conger et al. (2012) instead implies that entrepreneurial identities are general identities that can be formed upon several kind of minor identities called person identities, role identities, and social identities. Every entrepreneur can be thought of as a carrier of specific sub-identities that form the general entrepreneurial identity by interacting with each other and with the context. In particular, the authors pose a person’s identities, which grow upon—and are linked to—social and cultural characteristics that have been assimilated by an individual and let them think of themselves as special or unique, as the core of their model. They achieved this by defining them as trans-situational master identities that can shape an entrepreneur’s course of action through different ways: directly, which for example leads him/her to choose a particular mission or vision for his/her venture, and indirectly, through the enacting of other minor identities, such as the ones encompassing social or political roles. In their work (Conger et al. 2012), the authors suggest that these master identities, as byproducts of inner characteristics, can be considered as a powerful link between one’s inner worlds and actions and thus may have a role in defining the relation between intention and behavior. This assumption is in line with the studies regarding the role of SI in the TPB framework (Rise et al. 2010) and was tested in this study. Finally, some studies have proposed that identity aspiration can have an impact on life changing choices and related behaviors, such as career choice and planning, stating that one’s present behavior might be influenced even by characteristics one does not already possess but hopes to do so in the future, for example, the characteristics labeled as unique of an organized group to which one aspires to belong in the future (Alsos et al. 2016;Watson 2013). This consideration represents a turning point since it gives scholars a good reason to investigate entrepreneurial intention and characteristics in subjects who are not yet entrepreneurs. Since our study was conducted on a group of students and fresh graduates, we chose to investigate the relation between SI and EI using items inspired by the theory of Conger et al. (2012), specifically referring to the person identity construct. We made this choice because the model proposed by Fauchart and Gruber (2011) seems to be more adapted to studying characteristics of someone who has already performed entrepreneurial behaviors and not someone who merely wishes to do so in the future. Following the work of Conger et al. (2012) and for the aim of this study, we defined the entrepreneurial self-identity construct as one’s perception of himself/herself regarding in particular the possession of traits that are widely labeled as distinctive of entrepreneurs and, taking into account the previous studies and results, we hypothesized: Adm. Sci. 2020,10, 46 6 of 14 Hypothesis 2 (H2). A higher level of entrepreneurial self-identity predicts a higher level of entrepreneurial intention. 4. Methodology 4.1. Subjects Our sample group was composed of students and fresh graduates signed up for the placement service of a public university department in Italy. Of the 265 invited subjects, 154 chose to participate in the survey (58% of the total invited subjects). One of the candidates was left out from the statistical analysis because he declared that he already had job-related experience in entrepreneurship. Finally, 153 candidates were fully accepted to participate in the survey. Taking into account their distinctive characteristics, the group was divided as follows: 70.6% were students and 29.4% fresh graduates, and there were more females than males (63.4% vs. 36.6%). Our population had an average age below 29 years old, while only a few were outliers in the upper tail of the age distribution—i.e., less than 4% were over 35 years old at the time of the study. Since our sample was characterized as described above, we were not surprised by the fact that almost of all candidates were looking for their first job or unemployed (90.8%) at the time of the invitation to participate in the survey. Finally, all of the final participants reported to have never attended a course about entrepreneurship or been self-employed. 4.2. Tools To test the hypothesis described before, we chose to use a two-section questionnaire. The first part of the questionnaire was focused on measuring the variables discussed in the previous section of this paper that may have an impact on the choice of becoming an entrepreneur: personal attitude towards entrepreneurship (PA), social norms (SN), perceived behavioral control (PBC), entrepreneurial intention (EI), and entrepreneurial self-identity (ESI). The last part was used to collect data about demographic and educational variables such as age, university course attended, and work experiences. In order to assess the five variables of the first part of the questionnaire, we asked the participants to rate, using a Likert-type scale with 7 points, from 1—do not agree at all—to 7—absolutely agree—(Ceresia and Claudio 2017), 23 sentences or items. (Ceresia and Claudio 2017). We now discuss, more in detail, the structure of the questionnaire: • The variables PA, PBC, SN, and EI were explored using items adapted from the Entrepreneurial Intention Questionnaire (EIQ) developed by (Liñ á n and Chen 2009). The subjects were asked to express their level of agreement on six statements for each variable (a total of 30 items). The ones that follow are examples of items used in the questionnaire: “In my opinion, being an entrepreneur implies having more advantages than disadvantages”, “My parents will share my goal of becoming an entrepreneur”, “I know all the necessary details to build a start-up”, “I’ll do everything I can to become an entrepreneur”. • The ESI variable was assessed adapting four items from the scale developed by Terry et al. (1999) to explore self-identity perceptions. We asked the candidates to express their level of agreement on four statements regarding their consideration of themselves. An example item is the following: “I consider myself as someone who has entrepreneurial characteristics”. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of all items was used to assess the construct validity of the questionnaire scales. The results reported fairly adequate fit based on commonly accepted criteria (Hu and Bentler 1999;Kline 2005): χ2 (242) =513.568, p=0.000; comparative fit index (CFI) =0.92 ; Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) =0.91; root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) =0.08 . Furthermore, the results suggested that all items loaded statistically significantly on, and generated satisfactory standardized average variance extracted estimates for, their respective constructs (p<0.05). More specifically, the standardized regression weights of the five factors considered range between 0.368 and 0.923 (personal Adm. Sci. 2020,10, 46 7 of 14 attitude); 0.717 and 0.894 (subjective norm); 0.749 and 0.928 (perceived behavioral control); 0.574 and 0.931 (entrepreneurial self-identity); and 0.833 and 0.948 (entrepreneurial intention). 4.3. Procedures The subjects completed an online questionnaire. Some descriptive statistics, Cronbach’s alpha (values of the questionnaire’s factors were considered acceptable if higher than 0.70, in accordance with Cortina 1993), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of the questionnaire’s factors and a hierarchical multiple regression analysis for variables predicting entrepreneurship intentions were performed through IBM SPSS v. 23. The following assumptions of hierarchical multiple regression analysis were tested: • Sample size was analyzed for its adequacy, given the number of independent variables to be included in the analysis (Tabachnick and Fidell 2001;) • Assumption of singularity was explored to rule out the possibility that the independent variables were a combination of other independent variables. Values for skewness and kurtosis between − 2 and +2 were considered acceptable in order to prove normal univariate distribution of the questionnaire variables (George and Mallery 2010;) • Assumption of multicollinearity was tested using tolerance and variance inflation factor (VIF) values. Tolerance values of 0.10 or less indicate that there may be serious multicollinearity, and any VIF of 10 or more provides evidence of serious multicollinearity (Bryman and Cramer 2005; Field 2005). The demographic variables were entered at stage one of the hierarchical multiple regression to control for sex (M =1, F =2), age (years), academic status (college student =1, graduated =2), and past work experience (years). 5. Results 5.1. Descriptive Statistics The Cronbach’s alpha coefficients and correlation of the questionnaire factors are shown in Table 1. The factors possess an adequate internal consistency since the overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficients are higher than 0.80. The correlation matrix shows a moderate degree of correlation, with the exception of entrepreneurship intention with personal attitude (r =0.715, p<0.01) and entrepreneurship intention with entrepreneurial self-identity (r =0.727, p<0.01), which show a high degree of correlation. The values for skewness of the probability distribution of all model variables range between − 0.967 and 0.386 (max SD =0.196), and the values for kurtosis of the probability distribution of all model variables range between 0.894 and − 0.747 (max SD =0.390); therefore, a normal univariate distribution of all questionnaire variables can be reasonably assumed. Table 1. Descriptive statistics. Cronbach’s alpha and correlation of the questionnaire factors (N =153). Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 Personal Attitude 5.07 1.22 (0.89) Subjective Norms 5.44 1.29 0.51 ** (0.84) Perceived Behavioral Control 3.23 1.31 0.39 ** 0.28 ** (0.93) Entrepreneurship Intention 4.28 1.55 0.71 ** 0.44 ** 0.53 ** (0.96) Entrepreneurial Self-Identity 3.23 1.33 0.56 ** 0.36 ** 0.61 ** 0.73 ** (0.85) ** p<0.01; α=Cronbach’s alpha; values on the diagonal are coefficient alphas. 5.2. Hierarchical Multiple Regression Analysis A three-stage hierarchical multiple regression analysis was conducted with entrepreneurship intention as the dependent variable (Table 2). The sample size of 153 was considered adequate given Adm. Sci. 2020,10, 46 8 of 14 the four independent variables to be included in the hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Since overall correlation between the supposed independent variables of entrepreneurial intention range between a moderate and high degree, the assumption of multicollinearity was tested. The assumption of multicollinearity was considered confirmed because the collinearity statistics were all within accepted limits (personal attitude: tolerance =0.544, VIF =1.838; subjective norm: tolerance =0.675, VIF =1.482 ; perceived behavioral control: tolerance =0.585, VIF =1.709; self-identity: tolerance = 0.500, VIF =2.001). The demographic variables were entered at stage one of the regression to control for sex, age, academic status, and past work experience. The hierarchical multiple regression revealed that at stage one, past work experience contributed significantly to the regression model (F [4.148] =2.64, p=0.036) and accounted for 4.1% of the variation in entrepreneurship intention. At stage two, the addition of PA, PBC and SN to the regression model explained an additional 57.6% of the variation in entrepreneurship intention, and this change in R 2 was significant (F [7.145] =31.012, p=0.000). At stage three, the addition of the entrepreneurial self-identity variable to the regression model explained an additional 9% of the variation in entrepreneurship intention, and this change in R 2 was significant (F [8.144] =39.739, p=0.000). Table 2. Summary of hierarchical multiple regression analysis for variables predicting entrepreneurship intentions (N =153). Variables Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 B SE B SE B SE Constant 4.92 **** 0.60 −0.36 0.64 −0.28 0.57 Demographic Variables Sex − 0.053 0.26 −0.05 0.17 −0.02 0.15 Age −0.13 0.16 −0.10 0.11 −0.13 ** 0.11 Academic Status −0.09 0.30 0.01 0.21 0.03 0.18 Past Work Experience 0.23 ** 0.12 0.06 0.08 0.74 0.07 Personal Attitude 0.56 **** 0.08 0.41 **** 0.08 Subjective Norms 0.05 0.08 0.03 0.07 Perceived Behavioral Control 0.30 **** 0.07 0.11 * 0.07 Entrepreneurial Self-Identity 0.42 **** 0.08 R20.07 0.60 0.69 Adjusted R20.04 0.58 0.67 df 148 145 144 F for change in R22.64 ** 64.31 **** 40.98 **** B=standardized beta coefficient; SE =standard error; * p<0.10. ** p<0.05. *** p<0.01. **** p<0.001; df =degrees of freedom. Remarkably, when personal attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control were included in stage two of the regression model, the past work experience variable was no longer a significant predictor of entrepreneurship intentions. Moreover, the age variable became a significant predictor (B = − 0.131, p<0.05) of entrepreneurship intentions when entrepreneurial self-identity was added to the regression model at stage three. As the regression model at stage three depicted in Table 2shows, the far more important predictor of entrepreneurial intentions was entrepreneurial self-identity (B =0.421, p<0.001), which uniquely explained 9% of the variation in entrepreneurship intentions, followed by personal attitude (B =0.409, p<0.001), whereas perceived behavioral control (B =0.111, p<0.10) was a barely significant and weak predictor of entrepreneurial intentions.