Entrepreneurial intention is a psychological state of entrepreneurs when they start a new venture or create new values in an extant enterprise (Bird, 1988). It is effectively predictable for such a rare, unobservable and time-lagged activity as entrepreneurship (Krueger et al., 2000). Entrepreneurial behavior involves specific activities of individuals inspired by the idea of starting a business (Penrose, 1959), and it has both a narrow and a broad sense. Narrow entrepreneurial behavior emphasizes the entrepreneurial opportunity identification and resources integration throughout the entrepreneurial process, while the broad sense includes a series of behaviors from survival to development after starting a business. We explore the entrepreneurial behavior from a narrow sense in the following sections.

Despite entrepreneurial behavior being the final goal of entrepreneurial intention (Gieure et al., 2020), due to the inherent difficulty of entrepreneurial behavior research, scholars did not focus on the antecedent variables of entrepreneurial behavior until Bird (1988) creatively proposed entrepreneurial intention as the precondition for starting and developing a new business in the late 1980s. Most of them noticed entrepreneurial intention as the starting point of the entrepreneurial process (Newman et al., 2019). Thereafter, the application of Planned Behavior Theory in entrepreneurship research has further stated the role of entrepreneurs’ attitudes (Barrios et al., 2021), namely, entrepreneurial intention, on their actual behavior (Ajzen, 1991; Mei et al., 2016). Essentially, entrepreneurship is intentional in view of entrepreneurial intentions as the entrepreneurial ideas aiming at planned behavior (Krueger et al., 2000). Thus, entrepreneurial intention is the only best predictor of entrepreneurial behavior (Krueger, 2017).

Individuals with high entrepreneurial intention are more concerned and sensitive to entrepreneurial information (Farrukh et al., 2017). They always have a stronger desire to achieve their entrepreneurial goals than those with low intentions (Bird, 1988). Specifically, they are inclined to respond sensitively to the related information (Kickul et al., 2010), in order to identify entrepreneurial opportunities quickly (Fearon et al., 2019) and skillfully integrate external entrepreneurial factors, such as materials, technology, and information (Meyer and Meyer, 2020). Meanwhile, their desire for entrepreneurial goals will be internalized as the motivation to inspire themselves to work hard toward achieving the presupposed goals (Sheeran, 2002). Only intrinsic motivation can have a positive influence on individuals (Ryan and Deci, 2020; Zhan et al., 2021a). If the antecedents of entrepreneurship are met, they would implement entrepreneurial behavior and advance on the right track (Barrios et al., 2021). Accordingly, this paper suggests that entrepreneurial intention has a positive effect on the development of entrepreneurial behavior. Thus, based on the arguments presented above we hypothesize:

Multiple studies have argued that entrepreneurial intention does not transform directly into entrepreneurial behavior (Sheeran, 2002; Zhu et al., 2017), and the entrepreneurial cognitive bias has aroused some scholars to seek the bridge between them. Hereby, drawing upon the concept of organizational commitment with three components affective, normative and continuance (Meyer and Herscovitch, 2001), entrepreneurial commitment has been proposed and considered a closer psychological variable to entrepreneurial behavior. If individuals intend to be self-employed and are willing to devote a huge amount of time (Wood et al., 2019), energy (Naz et al., 2020), money (Bice, 2020), intelligence (Ristianti et al., 2020), and endurance (Barba and Atienza, 2017) to entrepreneurial activities, they would have high entrepreneurial commitment and are more likely to start up rather than only staying with intentions. Therefore, entrepreneurial commitment plays a role as bridge between “intention” and “behavior.” In addition, entrepreneurial commitment could be divided into three key dimensions: affective, behavioral, and continuance commitment (Tang, 2008).

Actually, individuals with higher intentions would be more sensitive and concerned about information related to entrepreneurship, such as that from entrepreneurial books, contests, study classes (Hassan et al., 2020), experience sharing meetings (Giones et al., 2016), business incubators (Al-edenat and Hawamdeh, 2020), policies (Bahl et al., 2020), and so forth. With unconscious influence, they will be determined to pursue their entrepreneurial intention with more motivation and willingness to promote entrepreneurial ideas, and naturally form the desire to start businesses, which is also known as entrepreneurial commitment. It is an individual’s internal commitment to undertake entrepreneurial activities in the future. Those with high entrepreneurial commitments spend more time studying entrepreneurial knowledge (Saptono et al., 2020), which means they are more likely to choose to start businesses in the future. Though they might fail, they would keep going until they succeed. There is no doubt that entrepreneurial commitment binds an individual to their goals (Fayolle and Liñán, 2014; Dahmardeh and Nastiezaie, 2019). Therefore, it is considered as a bridge between entrepreneurial intention and behavior (Wallmeroth et al., 2018), playing its transitional role between them. The above explains the “intermediary role” of “entrepreneurial commitment” to a certain extent. In conclusion, we thus propose:

To understand the specific role of entrepreneurial commitment, we test the mediating effect of entrepreneurial commitment from its three dimensions. We adopt a pattern most accepted by scholars to divide its dimensions into affective commitment, behavioral commitment, and continuance commitment (Tang, 2008; Indrawati et al., 2015). Specifically, affective commitment notes the willingness, excitement, and persistence of individuals in entrepreneurship (Jena, 2020), which also shows individuals’ psychological attachment to the employment through fondness, pleasure, or preference (Zhang et al., 2019). As for those who regard entrepreneurship as the enactment of a non-pecuniary goal (Dahmardeh and Nastiezaie, 2019), a high level of commitment will facilitate the continuance of their venture to realize their own goals. Meanwhile, people with high levels of behavior commitment focus more on accomplishment of their entrepreneurial “task”; hence, they are willing to devote whatever they have to the activity (Tang, 2008), such as time, money, effort, and passion. Continuance commitment is closely related to the costs of giving up their present position (Meyer and Allen, 1991). Based on some studies of commitment (Tremblay, 2021), it is twofold: first, people with a high level of continuance commitment resist stopping halfway considering the huge costs and sacrifices; second, they will not recognize other options as an alternative in their career. This study adopted the three-component model of commitment accepted by Tang (2008) and Indrawati et al. (2015) to test the mediating effect of three underlying dimensions of entrepreneurial commitment. Hence, hypothesis H4 also includes the three following sub-hypotheses:

Family plays an essential role in shaping an individual’s propensity for aspects of emotion (Edelman et al., 2016), spirit (Abraham, 2020), and mentality (Saptono et al., 2020). It is the primary and most powerful emotional system for an individual (Xu et al., 2020), and parents provide the most support for the young in making occupational decisions. We argue that the decisive role of parents dominates personal decisions in the Chinese context according to our survey of 124 university students, of whom 81 (65.3%) responded parents and 7 (5.6%) chose brothers or sisters in answer to the question: “The person who has most influenced you in your decision-making process.” Due to the complexity of self-employment, which is one of the most important career choices for contemporary university students, their families have certain expectations and make requests. Family support of emotions or resources can help students to enhance their abilities and confidence in dealing with difficulties, construct their mental safeguards (Zhong et al., 2016), meet uncertainty and emergency issues (Zhan et al., 2021b,c), and make strategic decisions in a calmed state under low pressure (Zhang et al., 2019). Specifically, family members would take an approach to offer entrepreneur resources with lower prices, because of their close relationship and inherent consciousnesses (Banerji and Reimer, 2018). Besides, young entrepreneurs who are resource-poor always ask those whom they have strong ties with for help throughout the emergence phase (Klyver et al., 2018; Abraham, 2020). Not only that, when entrepreneurs want to share some ideas, their parents are the best listeners. Similarly, the suggestions of parents are vital for those entrepreneurs who need to make an important decision (Annisa et al., 2021). Consequently, throughout the entrepreneurial process, family support mainly indicates the support that parents offer to entrepreneurs, such as entrepreneurial funds, information, connections, and emotion (Edelman et al., 2016; Jena, 2020).

This study suggests that entrepreneurs with high family support can receive more understanding and respect from parents for their engagement in entrepreneurship and the special occupational decision they have made undertaking more risk and responsibility (Verver and Koning, 2017). The parents might support them in terms of venture capital, interpersonal networks (Bohlmann et al., 2017), work experience (Estrada-Robles et al., 2020), and care to ease their stress when making strategic decisions in a complicated and changeable social environment (Zhang et al., 2019). That is, family support would help to transform entrepreneurial intention into behavior (Jaskiewicz et al., 2015; Hernández-Linares and López-Fernández, 2018). In addition, the increase in their entrepreneurial commitment after overcoming the main obstacles in entrepreneurship also speed up the translation of entrepreneurial behavior (Failla et al., 2017). Furthermore, those with high entrepreneurial intention and family supports might have a strong sense of moral obligation and proceed to entrepreneurial plans and behaviors in return for family support (Edelman et al., 2016). On the contrary, parents of those with low family supports lack understanding of their work and even hinder them, so that their sense of frustration would increase tremendously while their possibility of success would decrease. Based on this, the following hypotheses were proposed:

The conceptual model of the action mechanism of entrepreneurial intention to engage in entrepreneurial behavior in this study is shown in Figure 1.

In this study, snowball sampling approach was utilized to recruit university students from six major universities in South China and encourage them to pass the survey on to other students. The snowball sampling approach is often used for the survey of rare groups, such as university students. First find an individual (i.e., the “source,” also referred to as the “seed”) who has the desired characteristics and uses the person’s social networks to recruit similar participants (Sadler et al., 2010). A total of 521 questionnaires were distributed and 495 respondents were obtained, including 469 valid respondents, the recall rate was 95%. Missing values were specified for the questionnaires with fewer missing values, and holographic maximum likelihood estimation was used. The overall effective rate was 94.75%. The respondents of the questionnaire survey consisted of 55.4% females; 7.5% were aged 18 years old or below, 90.8% aged between 19 and 22 years old, and 1.7% aged 23 years old or above; 20.9% were freshmen, 27.3% were sophomores, 29.4% were juniors, and 22.4% were seniors. Regarding the occupation of the respondents’ fathers, privately- or individually-owned business accounted for 28.6%, followed by farmers (16.0%) and workers (14.9%). Regarding the occupation of the respondents’ mothers, most mothers were from other occupations, accounting for 23.8%, followed by privately- or individually-owned business (21.4%) and farming (16.2%). Additionally, the highest ratio (23.1%) of family per capital monthly income was located in the range of 3,500–6,000 RMB.

The chosen constructs are mostly based on established measurement scales. In line with relevant research (Edelman et al., 2016; Liu T. et al., 2019), we conceptualized and measured the family support with 12 items, such as “My parents respect my idea of starting a business.” Apart from the measurement of family support compiled by the research team, other variables were mainly based on the mature scale in China and other countries. Gordon approach was adopted to determine the number of entries and the representation of the Family Support Scale. The contents are as follows:

Entrepreneurial intention was operationalized as construct with four formative dimensions (Mei et al., 2016, 2017; Hoang et al., 2020), capturing different configurations that might promote the innovation behavior, that is, uncertain timetable, unlimited timetable, limited timetable, and clear timetable.

Entrepreneurial commitment was assessed with a measurement scale based on Iffan (2018), with 10 items, comprising affection commitment (items 1–4), behavior commitment (items 5–9), and continuance commitment (items 9–10).

Entrepreneurial behavior was assessed with 15 items extracted from Edelman et al. (2016) and Vamvaka et al. (2020), referring to behavior about ‘knowledge preparation,’ “ability to cultivate,” “team preparation,” “information preparation,” “fund preparation,” and “relationship preparation.”

Family support was assessed with a validated scale with 12 items developed by Edelman et al. (2016) and Liu T. et al. (2019), which reflected the degree of parental support for the respondents’ entrepreneurship.

We controlled family location, parent’s occupation, family income, and entrepreneurial experience of family member and friends as potential control variables.

Unless otherwise stated, the participants indicated their agreement on a 5-point Likert scale (from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). The final list of items for each construct is shown in Table 1. The specific contents of constructs and their reliability and validity are shown in Table 2.

SPSS 20.0 was used to run exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with half of the collected data. The KMO value was 0.821, and the Bartlett test was significant (p < 0.001). Six items for entrepreneurial behavior and three for family support were removed, as the results implied a low-level reliability load (less than the threshold of 0.5).

In the other half of the sample, the structural equation modeling was used for confirmatory factor analysis. The results showed that the model was well fitted with the data, and the specific results are demonstrated in Table 1, indicating that the factor load of each measurement index was higher over 0.5. Table 2 illustrates that the range of Cronbach’s alpha of each variable is 0.752–0.884, reaching more than the threshold of 0.7, and the combination reliability (CR) of each factor was greater than 0.7, indicating that the measurement has good reliability.

The descriptive statistical results of the variables are shown in Table 3, and the correlation analysis shows that there is a significant positive correlation between entrepreneurial behavior and entrepreneurial intention, entrepreneurial commitment, and family support (p < 0.001). It can be seen that the correlation between the variables is basically consistent. The variance expansion factor (VIF) of each variable is far less than 10, which indicates that there is no serious multi-collinearity between variables. The square roots of each factor average variance extracted are greater than the other related line values of its row and column, and the discriminant validity of the scale is good.

This study performed the Harman’s one-factor test (Podsakoff and Organ, 1986) to examine the common method bias. The results reveals that, no single factor emerged from this analysis, nor was there a general factor that was greater than 40% of variance in these variables. The first factor explained only 26.055% of the total variance. Thus, this indicates that common method bias is not an issue in this study.

We performed structural equation modeling using Mplus 7.4 to test the hypotheses. Firstly, we tested the effect of the predictor variable on the outcome variable. Results showed that entrepreneurial intention had a significantly positive effect on entrepreneurial behavior (γ = 0.519, p < 0.001). The mediating model (M_e) fit indices (χ²/df = 2.169, χ² = 676.834, df = 312, RMSEA = 0.052; SRMR = 0.071; CFI = 0.918, TLI = 0.909) all met the requirements of the study, indicating good fit to the sample data. Then, we tested the significance of the two mediating path coefficients. Results indicated that entrepreneurial intention had a positive effect on entrepreneurial commitment (α_me = 0.625, p < 0.001). Entrepreneurial commitment also had a significant, positive relationship with entrepreneurial behavior (β_me = 0.450, p < 0.001). Therefore, it was concluded that the mediating effect of entrepreneurial commitment reached a significant level. Lastly, after introducing entrepreneurial commitment as a mediating variable, the direct effect of entrepreneurial intention as a predictor on entrepreneurial behavior as an outcome variable was still significant (γ_me = 0.256, p < 0.001). Thus, the results provide support for H1, H2, and H3, demonstrating that entrepreneurial commitment plays a partial mediating role between entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial behavior, which supports H4.

Further, we examined the effects of three sub dimensions of the mediator variable using the same tests as above. The mediating models of affection (M_e1), behavior (M_e2), and continuance (M_e3) revealed the following good fit to the data: χ²/df = 2.621, 2.140, 2.249 (χ² = 471.851, 385.178, 321.666, df = 180, 180, 143); RMSEA = 0.061, 0.051, 0.053; SRMR = 0.076, 0.067, 0.062; CFI = 0.916, 0.929, 0.925; TLI = 0.905, 0.920, 0.913. It was found that entrepreneurial intention had a positive significant impact on affection, behavioral, and continuance commitment, respectively (α_e1 = 0.530, p < 0.001; α_e2 = 0.333, p < 0.001; α_e3 = 0.424, p < 0.001), and these three dimensions of commitment also positively influenced entrepreneurial behavior (β_e1 = 0.197, p < 0.01; β_e2 = 0.314, p < 0.001; β_e3 = 0.161, p < 0.05). Therefore, we determined that the mediating effects of affective, continuance, and behavioral commitment reached a significant level. Lastly, after introducing these three mediator variables in the model, the result still revealed the significant effect of entrepreneurial intention as a predictor on the outcome variable entrepreneurial behavior (γ_e1 = 0.427, p < 0.001; γ_e2 = 0.430, p < 0.001; γ_e3 = 0.452, p < 0.001). Affective, behavioral, and continuance commitment played a partial mediating role in the relationship between entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial behavior. Thus, H4a, H4b, and H4c were all supported.

The detailed test results of the hypothetical path in the above model are depicted in Table 4.

The results of the moderated mediating model test illustrated a good fit, with χ²/df = 2.671 (χ² = 1536.016, df = 575), RMSEA = 0.062, CFI = 0.904, and TLI = 0.896. We followed the testing procedure that was proposed by Wen and Ye (2014) to assess the moderated mediation. The moderated mediating model indicated that the entrepreneurial intention (i.e., independent variable) influences the entrepreneurial behavior (i.e., dependent variable) through the entrepreneurial commitment (i.e., mediating variable), and the mediating process is moderated by the family support (i.e., moderating variable). First, we establish a simple moderating model of the relationship between entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial behavior to test whether the direct effect is moderated by family support. Next, we establish a moderated mediation model to test whether the mediating effect of entrepreneurial intention on entrepreneurial behavior through entrepreneurial commitment is moderated by family support. Before the test, entrepreneurial intention and family supporting variables were mean-centered to minimize multi-collinearity. We first tested the simple moderating model to investigate whether family support moderates the relationship between entrepreneurial behavior and intention. Entrepreneurial intention significantly predicted entrepreneurial behavior (λ = 0.472, p < 0.001), and the interaction effect of entrepreneurial intention and family support was significantly positive (λ_if = 0.240, p < 0.001).

To further test the role of family support as moderator in the mediating mechanism from entrepreneurial intention to behavior through entrepreneurial commitment, we developed the moderated mediating model with only the indirect effect moderated and conducted path analysis in turn. Results suggest that entrepreneurial intention positively predicted entrepreneurial commitment (α_oe = 0.529, p < 0.001). The interaction effect of entrepreneurial intention and family support was also significantly positive (λ_ifc = 0.136, p < 0.05). Entrepreneurial commitment positively predicted entrepreneurial behavior (β_oe = 0.366, p < 0.001), while the interaction effect between entrepreneurial commitment and family support was not statistically significant (λ_cfb = 0.103, p = 0.115). Entrepreneurial intention positively predicted entrepreneurial behavior (γ_oe = 0.204, p < 0.01), and the interaction effect of entrepreneurial intention and family support was significantly positive (λ_ifb = 0.195, p < 0.001). The detailed results are depicted in Table 5.

Table 5 shows that family support moderates the mediating effect of entrepreneurial commitment on the link between entrepreneurial intention and behavior. Therefore, H5 and H6 were supported but H7 was not.

To further understand the moderating effect of family support between entrepreneurial intention and behavior, as well as entrepreneurial intention and commitment, we conducted simple slope analyses (Aiken and West, 1991) and plotted the moderating effect of family support in Figure 2. Figure 2A shows the effects of entrepreneurial intention on commitment for two levels of family support: low (regression coefficient was 0.084, R² = 0.007, t = 0.710, p = 0.480) and high (regression coefficient was 0.644, R² = 0.414, t = 6.181, p < 0.001). It reveals that the relationship between entrepreneurial intention and commitment is stronger at high levels than at low levels of family support, indicating that the positive relationship between entrepreneurial intention and commitment is strengthened by high family support. Figure 2B shows the effects of entrepreneurial intention on behavior for the two levels of family support: low (regression coefficient was 0.236, R² = 0.056, t = 1.986, p = 0.051) and high (regression coefficient was 0.578, R² = 0.335, t = 5.354, p < 0.001). It reveals that the relationship between entrepreneurial intention and behavior is stronger at high levels than at low levels of family support, indicating that the positive correlation between entrepreneurial intention and behavior is strengthened by high family support. In addition, Figure 2 shows the apparent crossing of two lines in each group. The slope of the solid lines (high family support) is greater than that of the dashed ones (low family support), thus suggesting that entrepreneurial commitment, as well as entrepreneurial behavior, is more strongly associated with entrepreneurial intention when the level of family support is high.