The moderating effect of entrepreneurship program on the factors affecting entrepreneurail intention among business and engineering students of selected Malaysian universities

This study used entrepreneurial intention as dependent variable, moreover attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control were used as independent variables while entrepreneurship program was used as a moderating variable. Entrepreneurial intention is the determination to engage in to venture creation. Attitude is the positive view or disposition of a person towards new venture creation. Subjective norms is the view of close family, ties or colleagues on a person’s decision to engage in entrepreneurial activities. Perceived behavioural control is the ease to venture in to new business. While entrepreneurship program is the teaching approach entrepreneurial processes. The population of study consists 11,378 business and engineering undergraduates, thus, 754 questionnaires were distributed to the respondents through email out of which 533 were returned (71%). This study used descriptive quantitative survey method to examine the entrepreneurial intention of Business and Engineering undergraduate students from Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) and Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) in relation. This study indicates that attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and entrepreneurship program all has a direct positive relationship with entrepreneurship intention. Similarly, entrepreneurship program positively moderates the relationship between attitude and perceived behavioural control and the entrepreneurship intention, but subjective norms presents a negative significant interaction. This study therefore contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by integrating the entrepreneurship program as a positive moderator to the relationship between attitude and perceived behavioural control on student’s entrepreneurship intention. This study recommend to blends the human capital theory and TPB to better understand the entrepreneurial intention of undergraduate students. However, considering the Beta values, attitude is the strongest factor that influences the entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurship program among students in selected Malaysian universities. The Malaysian government is therefore recommended to make more effort in redesigning its entrepreneurship development policies to fit the findings of this study.