Personal Agency: Determinant of Student's Academic Performance in Entrepreneurship Courses

Abstract

Several universities, government institutes, private colleges, and training setups have emerged in India for the purpose of entrepreneurial education. Most exhibit a lack of clarity in content, pedagogy, design, and curriculum delivery relevant to entrepreneurship development and education. The most important antecedent of entrepreneurial conduct is intention, which is described as agency in the literature on entrepreneurship. The study uses a sample of students who are evaluating their entry into the workforce to examine the relationship between personal agency and entrepreneurial intention. The study makes use of a theory of agency that takes actors' temporal orientations into account. Since one's agentic perceptions may appear as one's intention, including the concept of time in the study of intention would add a new perspective on how entrepreneurial intention works. This study explores the trait approach for explaining differences in learning capabilities in mathematical and quantitative subjects, which were introduced in MBA programs to enable the students to prepare predictive techniques. It uses this understanding to argue a case for content to be included while learning as well as pedagogy design. It was found that personal agency predicts the academic performance of students. Students with high personal agency were low on academic performance in subjects included in the curriculum with the intent to predict the future and were quantitative in nature. The study suggests using psychometric profiling of students who use a personal agency for enterprise creation and aligning their course content accordingly.