Intención emprendedora social y su relación con los factores de la personalidad: caso estudiantes de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas de la Universidad de Cuenca

Abstract

Despite the fact that Ecuador is full of sectors with unsatisfied basic needs in which social entrepreneurship emerges as an alternative to face poverty and economic crises, research on personality traits and their relationship with social entrepreneurship is limited. There is no doubt that there are certain traits that shape people's behaviors and actions and play an important role in decision making and entrepreneurship, which is why they should be developed and strengthened through entrepreneurship education. In this sense, the main purpose of the study was to determine the influence of personality traits on the social entrepreneurial intention of university students. For this purpose, a sample of 330 students from different careers of the Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences of the University of Cuenca was considered in order to evaluate the five major personality factors and the components of social entrepreneurial intention by means of a factor analysis and multiple regression to contrast the hypotheses proposed. The results obtained show that there is a significant positive correlation between the five personality traits and the students' intention to be social entrepreneurs, being especially important the openness to new experiences as it is the variable that affects four of the five dimensions of SE.