Abstract
Entrepreneurship research increasingly conceptualizes venture creation as a staged and evolving process, distinguishing between potential, nascent, and active entrepreneurs. While stage-based models map movement across entrepreneurial positions, they pay limited attention to a deeper psychological transition: when does entrepreneurship become a committed career rather than a temporary experiment? In parallel, the entrepreneurial career commitment literature conceptualizes commitment as a sustained psychological attachment to entrepreneurship as one’s primary occupational trajectory. However, these two streams, process models and career commitment research, have largely evolved in isolation, particularly within student populations.
This study integrates these perspectives by examining how entrepreneurial career commitment (ECC) develops among university students engaged in early-stage entrepreneurship. Using Social Cognitive Theory and institutional perspective, we see Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy (ESE) as the main cognitive factor that influences Entrepreneurial Career Commitment (ECC), while University Engagement Climate (UEC) and Prior Entrepreneurial Experience (PEE) act as important
Data were drawn from the 2023 wave of a large-scale national survey of student entrepreneurs in India. The analytical sample includes 3,589 university students identified as either nascent or active entrepreneurs. ECC was operationalized as a binary indicator capturing whether respondents intend their current venture to become their primary career after graduation. Moderated logistic regression analyses were conducted using PROCESS Model 2.
The findings indicate that ESE does not have a substantial direct impact on ECC; however, it exhibits notable conditional effects. The ESE × UEC interaction is positive, indicating that supportive university climates amplify the influence of self-efficacy on career commitment. In contrast, the ESE × PEE interaction is negative, meaning that self-efficacy is a strong predictor of ECC for students who have no prior entrepreneurial experience, but its impact decreases for those who do have experience. Supplementary analyses show that resilience follows a similar conditional pattern, whereas program learning alone exhibits weaker and less consistent effects.
Overall, the results indicate that entrepreneurial career commitment arises from the interplay of cognitive resources, supportive university climate, and experiential grounding. By positioning ECC within a stage-based framework, this study advances a conditional model of how entrepreneurship evolves from behavioral engagement into an anchored career identity among students.