THE EFFECTS OF UNIVERSITY'S SOCIAL CAPITAL ON STUDENTS' ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTIONS

Entrepreneurship has become one of the most far-reaching phenomena of our time. Implications of economic, political and social character have permeated our institutions, including universities. Although universities represent an institution that contributes to human and social capital development of the individual, for purposes of this study we focus on the latter and its relationship to entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intention on senior students. While interest in social capital in entrepreneurship literature has significantly increased in the last decade, several authors conclude that research is far from complete. This is mainly due to the simplification of the role of social capital, assuming that it is unitary regardless of context, in addition to the limited discussion of the dimensions of social capital and personal factors that interact and influence entrepreneurial behavior. Considering Ajzen's theory of planned behavior (TPB) with references to Bandura's social learning theory, we formulate several hypotheses on the impact of social capital embedded in the university context as a determinant of students' entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intentions. In addition, this study is built upon Nahapiet&Ghoshal's three dimensions of social capital - structural, cognitive and relational. This allows us to analyze the university's social capital dimensions that have not been addressed in the literature before, and that in turn leads us to consider possible implications for the university context. Therefore, this study proposes a structural equation modeling (SEM) to contrast possible relationships of university's social capital on both the self-efficacy and the entrepreneurial intention using a sample of 568 students from Spain and Mexico. Our findings show a positive relationship between the structural dimension on both entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intention. Also, there is a positive relationship between the relational dimension and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Regarding the cognitive dimension there appears not to be a relationship on either entrepreneurial self-efficacy or intention.