How gender moderates the mediating mechanism across social experience, self-referent beliefs and social entrepreneurship intentions

Abstract

Purpose This study aims to understand how social experience influences social entrepreneurial (SE) intentions through different types of self-referent beliefs and how gender affects this mechanism. Design/methodology/approach To test this study’s conceptual model, the authors conducted an online survey and recruited respondents via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. This study’s analysis is based on 743 responses. This study used structural equation modeling to test the main hypotheses, conducted decomposition tests using the bootstrapping method to test mediation effects via self-referent beliefs and executed multi-group analyses to examine gender-moderated mediation effects. Findings The results confirm that social experience significantly influences all three types of self-referent beliefs (entrepreneurial self-efficacy, SE self-efficacy and self-esteem). Furthermore, the mediating relationship across social experience, self-efficacies, and SE intentions is moderated by gender, as the relationships between social experience and self-efficacies are stronger for women than for men. Originality/value A clear gender gap exists in the way how social experience affects perceptual variables (self-referent beliefs), providing a practical suggestion to reduce the perceptual gender gap in social entrepreneurial contexts. This study also reveals the mediating mechanism across social experience, self-efficacies and SE intentions, also highlighting the importance of domain specific self-efficacies. This study’s findings support and extend Milliken’s (1987) framing of three distinct types of uncertainty to explain how individuals form SE intentions.

How do gender attitudes influence the relationships between perceived desirability, perceived feasibility and social entrepreneurial intentions?

“…, 2021; Aloulou et al. , 2023; Ko and Kang, 2022). Engaging students in various volunteer activities during their academic training can offer a magnificent opportunity to understand, learn, expand their knowledge, and even develop skills to build self-efficacy and networks (Wang et al.…”

“…In universities, students should be involved in social issues to be open to accepting and learning new values and ideas to solve social problems (Hossain et al. , 2021; Ko and Kang, 2022). Social entrepreneurship trainers and teachers need to support and motivate students, build confidence, and share positive experiences in fulfilling their entrepreneurial role (Hossain et al.…”

“…In universities, students should be involved in social issues to be open to accepting and learning new values and ideas to solve social problems (Hossain et al, 2021;Ko and Kang, 2022). Social entrepreneurship trainers and teachers need to support and motivate students, build confidence, and share positive experiences in fulfilling their entrepreneurial role (Hossain et al, 2021;Aloulou et al, 2023;Ko and Kang, 2022). Engaging students in various volunteer activities during their academic training can offer a magnificent opportunity to understand, learn, expand their knowledge, and even develop skills to build self-efficacy and networks (Wang et al, 2016;Shahid and Alarifi, 2021).…”

“…, 2022; Latif and Ali, 2021), Bangladesh (Latif and Ali, 2021; Hossain et al. , 2021), Pakistan (Latif and Ali, 2021), Germany (Dickel and Eckardt, 2021) and USA (Ko and Kang, 2022; Santos et al. , 2021).…”

Antecedents of women’s social entrepreneurship: values development and the perceived desirability and feasibility of social venture creation

“…The complex dynamics and influencers of SE (de Bruin and Teasdale, 2019) urge researchers to develop more nuanced understandings of antecedents of SE (Ko and Kang, 2022). Deployment of context-embedded approaches (Hechavarr ıa and Brieger, 2022) that enable interrogation of individuals' thinking processes (Tiwari et al, 2017), render visible the mental models, values and norms (Dickel and Eckardt, 2021) that inform SE decision-making (Kruse et al, 2019).…”