Predicting Entrepreneurial Intentions: Incremental Validity of Proactive Personality and Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy as a Moderator

Abstract

Despite scholarly calls for exploring how individual difference variables interact to influence entrepreneurial intentions, two commonly cited theories (theory of planned behavior and the entrepreneurial event model) do not offer explicit considerations of which variables interact and how they function together to influence intention. Drawing from these intentionbased models and extant empirical findings, we propose that a narrow personality characteristic, proactive personality, is more proximally related to entrepreneurial intentions than broader personality characteristics (e.g., FFM). More importantly, we also propose that proactive personality and entrepreneurial self-efficacy interact to predict unique variance in entrepreneurial intentions, whereby self-efficacy beliefs have stronger effects when proactive personality is high. Results supported our propositions and substantiated calls from the literature to examine interactional effects among antecedents of entrepreneurial intentions. We suggest that future intention-based models consider the interplay of personality characteristics and attitudes explicitly, particularly in narrow contexts such as entrepreneurship.