Investigating the Effect of Entrepreneurship Education on Goal Orientation: A Gender Perspective

Entrepreneurship Education (EE) for enterprising individuals has gained increasing attention in recent years as a means to foster innovation. While previous studies have primarily focused on the effect of these EE interventions on the development of entrepreneurial ideas or the performance of entrepreneurs’ firms, and mostly via firm-level analyses, less attention has been given to individual personality characteristics and motivational states. Goal Orientation (GO) is a valuable entrepreneurial personality characteristic that describes an individual’s propensity to pursue different types of goals, but it is also associated with motivation and achievement in various other life domains. Therefore, understanding how EE can shape individuals’ GO is important not only in the context of entrepreneurship but also in fields such as education and workplace organizations. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, we lack contributions on how EE, and particularly different types, can shape individuals’ GO. In this study, we aim to address this gap by (i) examining how different educational interventions affect individuals’ GO, and (ii) accounting for gender differences in this relationship, through a randomized control trial experiment involving 241 enterprising individuals who attended three different EE programs.