Entrepreneurship Education, mindset and entrepreneurial intentions: the moderating effects of creativity and role models

This study aims to investigate the impact of entrepreneurial education and mindset on entrepreneurial intentions through the mediating role of entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Furthermore, the study examines how creativity and role models moderate the link between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intentions. A total of 301 business students from 11 University of Technology and Applied Sciences (UTAS) branches located in different geographical areas across Oman contributed data to this study. To strengthen the reliability of the results, we adopted a dual data-analysis strategy by deploying two distinct analytical approaches (i.e., OLS-PROCESS and PLS-SEM) separately to test the hypothesised model. Both analytical approaches' results validated the proposed main effects among the study variables. Additionally, entrepreneurial self-efficacy mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial education and mindset, as well as between mindset and intentions. Remarkably, while OLS-PROCESS results yielded non-significant moderating effects, PLS-SEM substantiated the moderated mediation effects of creativity and role models on the indirect linkage of both entrepreneurial education and mindset with entrepreneurial intentions via entrepreneurial self-efficacy. This article significantly adds to the entrepreneurship literature by providing and empirically testing a model that explains the underpinning mechanisms and boundary conditions affecting the linkage between entrepreneurial education and business students' entrepreneurial intentions.