Personality Traits and Entrepreneurial Intention Among Undergraduate Students in Selected Tertiary Institutions in Southwest, Nigeria

Personal traits like internal locus of control, risk-taking propensity, the need for autonomy and the need for achievement have received strong supporting evidence and been applied as factors to predict entrepreneurial intention by many research experts. Despite the introduction of entrepreneurship courses at all higher institutions across the country, the unemployment rate continues to rise. This could indicate that graduates' proclivity to establish their own firms after graduation is low. Hence, this study evaluated the entrepreneurial intention on personality traits among undergraduate students in selected tertiary institutions in Southwest, Nigeria. The objectives of the study are to determine the relationship between acquisition of entrepreneurship knowledge, self-efficacy, and the impact of need for achievement on entrepreneurial intention among undergraduate students in Southwest, Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to select six universities currently running entrepreneurship as a programme in the South Western Nigeria; three polytechnics that are running entrepreneurship as part of their programmes were randomly selected for the study and stratified random technique used to select six hundred (600) final year students from the nine institutions. This sample size was determined by Godden (2004) formula for study population that is greater than fifty thousand respondents. Copies of structured questionnaire were used to collect the data from the respondents. Data were analyzed with the aid of descriptive statistics and correlation analysis to test the hypothesis and multiple linear regression analysis to assess the joint relationship of all independent variables and entrepreneurial intention of the respondents. Findings show that acquisitions of entrepreneurship knowledge (with .294**, p<0.05), need for achievement (with .544**, p<0.05), and perceived self-efficacy (with .519**, p<0.05) have positive and significant correlation with student’s entrepreneurial intention. The result from the regression analysis shows that there was a significant joint contribution of the independent variables to entrepreneurial intention of the students. It was concluded that Personality traits have influence in the prediction of entrepreneurial intention of the students. The study however recommends among others that Entrepreneurship education curriculum should be reviewed and enriched periodically to ensure that the student’s self-efficacy, need for achievement, and perceived desirability factors are taking care of.