Planned behavior and religious beliefs as antecedents to entrepreneurial intention: A study with university students

Abstract

Purpose: To investigate the relationship between religious beliefs and the constructs of the Theory of Planned Behavior in entrepreneurial intention. Originality/value: The article stands out by promoting the understanding of entrepreneurship from the Theory of Planned Behavior proposed by Ajzen (1991), aligning it with religious beliefs. Design/methodology/approach: It is an exploratory and descriptive study, of a quantitative nature. The survey method was used to collect the data, in which a sample of 448 students from the Business Administration courses at two public universities in the northeast of Brazil was obtained. Structural Equation Modeling was used to treat and analyze the data. Findings: The results demonstrated that personal attitude, perceived control, and religious beliefs influence the entrepreneurial intention of university students, which did not occur with subjective norms. However, subjective norms influenced the personal attitude and perceived control of university students. The university students presented a predisposition to entrepreneurship and recognized that they have the necessary skills to create a business. However, the choice to become an entrepreneur may not be motivated directly by the expectation of its social referents. Moreover, university students did not perceive the influence of religious beliefs in the manifestation of their behavior, because vocation and prosocial motivation are far from the environmental context in which university students are inserted or because they are not practicing a religion that fosters such beliefs.