Exploring entrepreneurial intention: The roles of proactive personality, education, opportunity and Planned Behavior

Entrepreneurial intention is crucial in fostering an entrepreneurial culture and driving economic growth, especially among students from higher education institutions. Our study aims to examine the role of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), specifically attitude towards entrepreneurship (ATE) and perceived behavioral control (PBC), in the relationships between proactive personality (PP), entrepreneurship education (EE), entrepreneurial opportunity (EO), and entrepreneurial intention (EI) among final-year students higher education institutions in China. The TPB framework provides a theoretical foundation to investigate how psychological factors, such as ATE and PBC, mediate an individual's intention to engage in entrepreneurial behavior. The research model was analyzed using PLS-SEM. The findings, derived from a sample of 250 final-year students from public universities in China, indicate that ATE and PBC mediate the relationships between PP, EO, and EI. However, only ATE was found to mediate the relationship between EE and EI. Our findings offer insights into the foundational mechanisms driving EI, significantly advancing the scholarly understanding of entrepreneurial behavior. By demonstrating the applicability of the TPB framework, our study sheds light on the psychological processes that underlie the connections between PP, EE, EO and EI.