Can University Students’ Psychological Resources Stimulate the Relationship between Entrepreneurial Optimism and Green Entrepreneurial Intentions? Moderating Role of Sustainability Orientation

Yunlong Zhang (), Asif Mehmood Rana, Hasnain Bashir, Ifraz Adeel, Shahid Khokhar and Jingyuan Ding
Additional contact information
Yunlong Zhang: Student Affairs Department, East China University of Political Science and Law, Shanghai 201620, China
Asif Mehmood Rana: Muscat College, Affiliated with University of Stirling, Muscat 112, Oman
Hasnain Bashir: Faculty of Business, Government & Law, University of Canberra, Canberra 2601, Australia
Ifraz Adeel: Quality Enhancement Cell, University of Home Economics, Lahore 54700, Pakistan
Shahid Khokhar: UE Business School, Division of Management and Administrative Sciences, University of Education, Lahore 54700, Pakistan
Jingyuan Ding: School of Economics and Management, Xi’an Fan Yi University, Xi’an 710105, China

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 8, 1-14

Abstract: Given the crucial role of entrepreneurial optimism (EO) in prompting university students’ green entrepreneurial intentions (GEI), scholars are still striving to explore the causal mechanism that can facilitate the underlying relationship. Based on the social cognitive theory, we hypothesize that individual’s psychological resources, entrepreneurial resilience (ER) and entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE), mediate the association between EO and GEI. In addition, this study seeks to investigate the impact of sustainability orientation (SO) in the relationship between EO and GEI. Data for this study have been collected from Chinese university students in their final years. The authors used variance-based Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test the proposed hypotheses. The findings indicate that EO significantly influences GEI. Further, ER and ESE significantly mediate the link between EO and GEI. Moreover, this study finds that SO significantly moderates the relationship between EO and GEI such that the association is stronger at high levels of SO and vice versa. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior studies have tested these relationships. The findings suggest that the proposed model can be utilized by practitioners and policy makers to facilitate the execution of green entrepreneurship among university students.

Keywords: entrepreneurial optimism; entrepreneurial resilience; entrepreneurial self-efficacy; green entrepreneurial intentions; sustainability orientation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6467/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/8/6467/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:8:p:6467-:d:1120547

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().