Psychological and Biographical Determinants of Entrepreneurial Intention: Does the Learning Environment Act as a Mediator?

Entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial intent: a comparative study of the private and government university students

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between educational qualification and entrepreneurial intent (EI) of the students of private and government universities located in the state of Odisha, India.

Design/methodology/approach

The study is based on the responses of 485 students of selected private and government universities in Odisha, India. A multistage random sampling approach has been adopted to collect the data and was tested for the role of different elements relating to education in explaining EI.

Findings

The findings suggest that the private universities are superior to the government universities in their Quality of Entrepreneurship Education (QEE), students' Exposure to Entrepreneurship Education (EEE) and their EI. Business Management and Commerce students have more inclination toward entrepreneurship compared to the students of professional streams like Law, Pharmacy, Engineering etc. Self-employed parents, EEE and Extra-Curricular Activities (ECA) are the significant determinants of EI among the university students; whereas, Academic Achievement (AA) and Socio-economic Status (SES) do not significantly explain their EI. Finally, gender also plays a vital role where male students show higher EI compared to their female counterparts.

Practical implications

The research provides an understanding of the significance of entrepreneurship education along with ECA in developing EI among government and private university students.

Originality/value

The paper not only empirically presents the major differences between private and government-owned universities while dealing with entrepreneurship development at the university level but also highlights the impact of demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the students on their EI.

Rivals When We Work Together: Team Rivalry Effects on Performance in Collaborative Learning Groups

Team rivalry has been mostly studied in competition settings, between competing individuals or teams, and has been linked to positive performance outcomes due to its impact on increasing motivation. However, rivalry is not limited to such contexts, it can also occur in collaborative settings, among team members working on a collaborative task. We argue that in such settings rivalry in teams has a negative impact on team performance, due to its negative impact on team learning behaviors. We employed a time-lagged, survey-based design with a sample of 176 students (55 teams) to investigate the relationship between rivalry and team performance through team learning behaviors. Our results based on simple mediation analyses show that, for our sample, rivalry in teams was not in fact negatively correlated to learning behaviors. Furthermore, we did not find support for the hypothesized positive relationship between learning behaviors and team performance, nor for the partial mediation model we proposed. We show how a series of team and task characteristics could explain our results and discuss potential future directions in the study of rivalry in collaborative settings.