Undergraduates' intentions to take examinations for professional certification: examinations of four competing models

Previous research on professional certification has primarily focused on graduate certificates in intensive care nursing, writing certificates for practitioners, maintenance of certification in radiation oncology, and the certification of teachers and surgeons. Research on certification in the domain of business and management from an attitudinal-behavioral approach has been lacking. Social psychological theories provide potentially useful tools for explaining how attitudes, intentions, and behaviors are changed. The current study compared four intention-based models-the theory of planned behavior, the theory of self-regulation (TSR), the revised TSR (in which desire is a partial mediator), and the other revised TSR (in which desire is a full mediator)-in terms of their ability to predict the intentions of business and management students to obtain certification in their fields. Participants were drawn from the southern, middle, and northern areas of Taiwan. A structural equation model applied to a sample of 273 undergraduates demonstrated that attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioral controls, desires, intentions, and behaviors were associated with certification in business and management domains. The explanatory power of the revised TSR in which desire was a full mediator was superior to that of the competing models. Implications and future directions are discussed.