The TBP and Entrepreneurial Motivation: How Do Institutional Pillars and Entrepreneurial Education Foster Tunisian Students’ Entrepreneurial Intention?

Abstract

To stimulate economic growth, different governments have considered institutional frameworks and policies in place to support entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, a number of studies have demonstrated that institutional and individual factors influence entrepreneurial intentions in different ways, which contributes to inefficiencies. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to analysis the relationship between a set of personal and contextual factors and entrepreneurial intention. Using the PLS-SEM software a mediation analysis was conducted on data gathered from a sample of 367 undergraduate Tunisian students. The results indicated that the TPB not only has direct influence on entrepreneurial intention but that it also has a positive mediation effect on the influence of institutional pillars on entrepreneurial intention. The results of this study highlight the relevance of the interactive effects of personal characteristics, education, motivation, and government policies on entrepreneurial intention. Therefore, this study adds to the body of entrepreneurship literature in two ways: first, by confirming the strong findings that public support is among the best indicators of entrepreneurial intention (EI): we confirmed that in the Tunisian society, entrepreneurship is a socially supported behaviour and is regarded as an appropriate career option. Second, we provided a framework for future research to address the paradoxical findings, according to Shirokova et al. (2020), similar organizations and resources for entrepreneurship may yield different outcomes under different circumstances, which contradicts our findings.