The Drivers of Entrepreneurial Intention: The Role of Social Capital and Overconfidence

Abstract

This study integrated the theory of social capital and cognitive bias to investigate the formation of entrepreneurial intentions. Among many kinds of biases, we took overconfidence biases that have been studied widely and relevant to entrepreneurship into consideration. Moreover, this study proposed that social capital of entrepreneurs matter for overconfidence biases, and investigated whether the relationship between social capital and entrepreneurial intention is mediated by overconfidence. Furthermore, following Seibert et al. (2001), this study conceptualized social capital into two components: (1) access to information and resources, and (2) career sponsorship. Using university students in Taiwan as our research sample, we collected 346 samples, and adopted the SEM technique to test the hypotheses. The empirical results indicated that social capital in terms of information and resource accessibility can encourage young people to consider entrepreneurship as a career, while social capital in terms of career sponsorship can inspire entrepreneurial intention mediated only by overconfidence. Keywords: Social Capital, Cognitive Bias, Overconfidence, Entrepreneurial Intention To cite this document: Lin-Ju Cheng and Chun-Chieh Liao, "The Drivers of Entrepreneurial Intention: The Role of Social Capital and Overconfidence", Contemporary Management Research, Vol.13, No.2, pp. 143-162, 2017. Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.7903/cmr.17589