Who Needs Entrepreneurial Role Models? Driving Forces of Students’ Cyber-Entrepreneurial Career Intention

Cyber-entrepreneurship has become an important topic of debate in academia primarily because of an increasingly competitive nature of E-commerce industry and internet. Since cyber-entrepreneurial career-decision encompasses higher degree of personal risks and commitments among those aspiring to become ‘cyber-entrepreneurs’, there is need for in-depth understanding on the driving factors that influencing Cyber-entrepreneurial intentions. By integrating the concepts of social cognitive theory and goal-setting theory, the current research aims to explore the effects of Cyber-entrepreneurial self-efficacy (CESE) and goal commitment (GC) on Cyber-entrepreneurial intentions (CEIs) in the context of undergraduate entrepreneurship education, and inquires whether the presence of entrepreneurial role models (ERMs) has any effect on the CEIs among undergraduates. Structural equation modeling and multi-group analysis were used to analyze the data collected from 279 undergraduate students from several universities in Taiwan—among which 146 were with entrepreneurial role models and 143 were without. The results showed that GC has a partial mediation effect between CESE and CEI only in the cases of students without ERMs. Multi-sample SEM revealed a significant difference between the effects of CESE on CEI in students with and without ERMs. These findings may have important theoretical and practical implications to students undertaking entrepreneurship degrees and those making leap-decisions to enter the cyber-entrepreneurial field.