This study empirically examined the effects of founder characteristics and mentoring factors on entrepreneurial satisfaction, as well as the moderating effect of satisfaction with government startup support, from the perspective of Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1977). Social Learning Theory posits that an individual's behaviors and attitudes are learned through direct experience, vicarious experience, and environmental reinforcement. Within an entrepreneurial context, direct experience was conceptualized as mastery experience, mentoring as vicarious experience and verbal persuasion, and satisfaction with government startup support as environmental reinforcement. The study sample was limited to pre-startup and early-stage entrepreneurs participating in domestic startup support programs in March 2023. Based on 248 valid responses collected from 302 distributed self-administered questionnaires, SPSS was used to conduct validity verification, reliability verification, correlation analysis, and hierarchical multiple regression analysis. While previous entrepreneurship studies analyzed the effects of founder characteristics, mentoring, and government startup support individually, this study systematically examined the interactions among these factors by comprehensively considering the learning sources within social learning theory. The analysis revealed the following: First, founder characteristics such as prior entrepreneurial experience and relevant work experience did not have a statistically significant effect on entrepreneurial satisfaction. This suggests that, consistent with social learning theory, the nature of the experience—specifically, the quality of achievement experiences and the transferability of experience—is more crucial for satisfaction than mere presence or absence of experience. Second, among the mentoring factors, the mentor's entrepreneurial experience significantly influenced entrepreneurial satisfaction, validating the effects of vicarious experience and role modeling through the mentor's practical entrepreneurial background. However, mentoring frequency did not have a significant effect. This implies that the qualitative content of verbal persuasion is more important than quantitative frequency. Third, higher satisfaction with government startup support strengthened the relationship between founder characteristics and entrepreneurial satisfaction. This suggests that environmental reinforcement factors activate experience more than the founder's own experience. Fourth, higher satisfaction with government startup support strengthened the relationship between the mentor's startup experience and startup satisfaction, indicating that environmental reinforcement facilitates the transfer of the mentor's experience. However, the relationship between
Lee et al. (Sun,) studied this question.
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