The Influence of Persuasion and Social Capital on Enterepreneurial Intention: A Study of Cultural Comparison Between Malaysian and Indonesian Students in Universiti Utara Malaysia

In today’s economic, entrepreneurs remain crucial to generate more job fields since employment is no longer sustainable and number of unemployed persons become increase. Facing this situation, however, the governments strongly promote entrepreneurship as a career choice in the students’ future. Still, they are not really eager to be an entrepreneur after their graduation. Hence, the current study presents a comparison study to examine the relationship of persuasion, social capital and entrepreneurial intention between Malaysian and Indonesian students in Universiti Utara Malaysia. The study also investigates the differences of those variables between two nationalities. A sample of 288 students completed questionnaire including 36 items of appropriateness, self-consistency, national consistency, supportive strong-ties, helpful strong-ties, helpful weak-ties and entrepreneurial intention. The questionnaire by de Pillis and Reardon (2007), Sequeira, Mueller and McGee (2007) and Liñán, Guerrero and Urbano (2007) was adopted, pilot-tested and used in this study. The findings showed that there are statistically significant differences between Malaysian and Indonesian students in supportive strong-ties and helpful weak-ties whereby the significant level are below 0.05. In addition, the study revealed that persuasion (appropriateness and self-consistency) and social capital (helpful strong-ties) can significantly predict entrepreneurial intention. At the end, the implications both theoretical and practical are discussed further in this study.