FEAR OF FAILURE AS A BARRIER TO START-UP AND ITS EFFECTS ON ASPIRANT ENTREPRENEURS

Abstract

Researchers have looked into the theory of planned behaviour from many angles as it has a number of applications. Its role in explaining the entrepreneurial intention has widely been acknowledged. Keeping in view, that the area still needs to be explored. Keeping this need in mind, this article investigates the association between entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial intentions among university students in Pakistan. Besides, the direct relationship between these two constructs, the study also examines the moderating role fear of failure of social embarrassment between the EE-EI link. In all, 223 questionnaires from first- and second-year students were analyzed using hierarchal regression. The prior studies on the EE-EI relationship have mainly focused on the developed economies and have overlooked the potential effect of FF that prevents the university students to create their own venture, even though they take the entrepreneurship course as compulsory subject. Thus, this study fills the gaps in the EI literature and examines the moderating role of FF in the subject relationship in the context of a developing country Pakistan. The findings of the study reveal that EE is positively and significantly linked with the EI. The findings also report that FF negatively moderates the well-established link between EE and EI. The study provides several avenues for future research on EI and EE.