TAF PUBLISHING

The scarcity of young farmers is a severe structural problem encountered in small-scale agricultural countries. How to encourage agricultural students to enter into farming careers is becoming a political priority for agricultural policy. Previous studies suggested that proactive entrepreneurship is regarded as an important driver for business expansion in rural areas. Agriculture-related social enterprises are seen as a crucial solution to the challenges faced and have gradually become part of mainstream business in rural areas. However, there is limited research available on individual traits and factors that affect students’ intentions to set up agri-business to pursue a social and/or environmental contribution. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of personality traits and creativity factors of university students on their social entrepreneurship. A survey was designed to measure social entrepreneurial intentions as a dependent variable and personality traits and creative ability as explanatory variables. A face-to-face interview was conducted and targeted the students in two national universities and followed a systematic sampling scheme during October and November 2017. A total of 585 respondents were obtained. A Structural Equation Modeling was used to examine causal relationships among latent variables. The results show that social entrepreneurship is positively influenced by the personality traits of agricultural students directly. However, the creative ability does not have a direct impact on entrepreneurial intentions significantly. Our results reveal that creativity is mediated by personality traits and affects social entrepreneurship intention indirectly. This study contributes to a better understanding of the structural relationship between personality, creativity, and social entrepreneurship by developing and testing a structure model. The main policy implication of this study can be inferred. In addition to professional creativity courses, we suggest that educators and policymakers regarding entrepreneurship education need to pay more attention to the general education courses related to personality re-shaping. To enhance extraversion, emotional stability, and openness of personality traits may serve agricultural students better to engage in social entrepreneurship after their graduation.