Driven by empathy, enabled by perceived social support: gendered configurational dynamics in social entrepreneurial intention

Purpose Although the Mair and Noboa’s (2006) framework identifies four individual-level antecedents of social entrepreneurial intention (SEI), it pays limited attention to individuals’ perceptions of the broader institutional environment and to potential gendered variations in SEI formation. This study aims to extend the framework by incorporating perceived regulatory support across genders. This study also addresses inconsistent findings regarding the roles of empathy and moral obligation in SEI formation. To do so, this study adopts a configurational approach to examine how the four antecedents in Mair and Noboa’s framework and perceived regulatory support combine into pathways to SEI among women and men. Design/methodology/approach This study posits that contradictory findings in prior research may reflect diverse, systematic patterns across individual cases, which conventional approaches overlook. Hence, this study analyzed a survey of undergraduate students in Vietnam (n = 685), using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to examine multiple, interdependent pathways to SEI among women and men. Findings Gender subgroup analyses reveal distinct configurational patterns of SEI: while women’s SEI emerges with multiple compensatory configurations, men’s SEI is formed through a single reinforcement configuration. For both women and men, empathy emerges as a necessary condition for SEI, while perceived social support emerges as a pervasive enabler across configurations. In contrast, moral obligation is selectively combined with other elements across different configurational pathways. Originality/value This study extends the SEI framework by demonstrating how Mair and Noboa’s SEI antecedents and perceived regulatory support jointly form SEI through distinct configurations within each gender subgroup. It further refines the framework by revealing the selective coupling of empathy and moral obligation across distinct pathways of SEI formation. Finally, this study highlights perceived social support as a pervasive enabling condition in SEI formation, thereby providing contextual insights into SEI within Vietnam’s collectivistic context.