Entrepreneurial Motivation in University Business Students: A Latent Profile Analysis based on Self-determination Theory

The development of entrepreneurship education (EE) has become a top priority for many universities around the world. Accordingly, the objectives of this paper are to identify motivation profiles of university business students, to determine how profile membership predicts students’ entrepreneurial intention and interest to study entrepreneurship, and to identify predictors of membership in these motivation profiles. To achieve these objectives, our method entails the application of self-determination theory (SDT) in a person-centered analysis. Our study is, in fact, the first application of the full range of motivations from SDT to define students’ entrepreneurial motivations; furthermore, we use latent profile analysis to identify groups of students that can be distinguished according to these motivations. We discover four groups of students: 1) uniformly lowly motivated, 2) indifferent, 3) conflicted, and 4) uniformly highly and intrinsically motivated. We find that students in these groups differ with regard to their interest to study entrepreneurship and their intention to be entrepreneurs. We also identify psychological traits and background factors that could explain the group membership. We discuss the implications of these findings on the promotion and delivery of EE, and on how students may be motivated to become entrepreneurs.