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ABSTRACT
Can entrepreneurship education strengthen students' motivations to pursue entrepreneurial careers? By applying Vroom's (1964) expectancy theory in a longitudinal study, we demonstrate that entrepreneurship education can increase students' entrepreneurial motivation and intentions. More specifically, we employ a pre- and post- research design to examine university students enrolled in an introductory entrepreneurship course and find that that expectancy, instrumentality and valence enhance entrepreneurial motivations. Our results support the supposition that expectancy theory may be useful in predicting entrepreneurial intentions. In addition, our findings show that students' participation in an entrepreneurship course strengthened their expectancy and desirability, leading to stronger motivation and intentions. These findings have significant implications for research and practice, which are discussed.
INTRODUCTION
Why individuals become self-employed is one of the most important research questions in the field of entrepreneurship in part because it may be possible to use a better understanding of entrepreneurs' motivations to enhance the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education in increasing the rate of entrepreneurship and increasing entrepreneurs' effort and performance. Increased quantity and better quality entrepreneurial activity in turn magnifies the potential benefits that society accrues from entrepreneurship, especially greater employment and innovation. Consistent with its importance, entrepreneurial motivation has been extensively examined in the entrepreneurship literature. However, most of the research investigating individuals' motivations for becoming self-employed has employed the same theoretical perspective: that of Ajzen's (1991) theory of planned behavior (Renko et al., 2012). The applicability of other motivation theories to selfemployment has not been as widely explored. More specifically, Kuratko et al. (1997) highlighted a lack of empirical research on entrepreneurial motivations, and Edelman et al. (2010) point to expectancy theory as a relevant model for examining entrepreneurial motivation. Likewise, Renko et al. (2012) encouraged "further research on expectancy theory in entrepreneurship" (p. 683). Responding to these recommendations, we apply Vroom's (1964) expectancy theory to identify the drivers of entrepreneurial motivation in the context of entrepreneurship education. We propose that expectancy, instrumentality and valence increase entrepreneurial intentions. We also propose that entrepreneurship education will strengthen these positive relationships.
Expectancy Theory
Expectancy theory (Vroom, 1964) has been successfully applied to explain motivation in a wide variety of organizational contexts (Burton et al., 1992; Chou & Pearson, 2012; Julian & Ofori-Dankwa, 2008; Lynd-Stevenson, 1999; Tyagi, 2010;...