Social environment and entrepreneurial intentions among college students: the mediated effect of proactive personality

Entrepreneurial intention is associated with both students’ social environments and individual characteristics, but their connection is not yet fully discussed. Drawing on social cognitive theory, we take university support, family background, and peer influence into a social-environment framework and examine the mediating role of proactive personality. We use data from 1,058 university students surveyed in China and apply partial least squares structural equation modeling to test the proposed relationships. The results show that university support, family background, and peer influence are all positively associated with entrepreneurial intention. They are also positively related to proactive personality. Proactive personality partially mediates the relationship between each social-environment dimension and entrepreneurial intention, while the direct relationships remain significant. The results further show that the three social environments are related but do not operate in exactly the same way. Overall, this research connects social context and individual characteristics within one framework and provides a more integrated explanation of how university students form entrepreneurial career intentions.