Towards Entrepreneurial Motivation: The Self-Determination Theory Approach

Entrepreneurship as primarily driven by human agency. Hence, human motivation plays an important role in who becomes an entrepreneur even at the early stage of business gestation. The paper proposes a process theory grounded in theoretical frameworks of the human Self-Determination Theory (SDT) and the Ajzen theory of planned behaviour -a model of how an individual's entrepreneurial intent is shaped by their exposure to parental entrepreneurial activity fully mediated through development of the internally regulated types of motivations as indicative of their autonomous causality orientation. The model is then validated through multiple regression correlational analysis as well as individual path analysis via a series of hierarchical multiple regressions.