From intention to entrepreneurial behavior: to what extent can the notions of commitment and planned intention facilitate the passage to action?

Summary In an effort to understand what drives entrepreneurs to act, entrepreneurship researchers have been using intention models in their studies for decades. The most famous are Azjen's Theory of Planned Action and Shapero and Sokol's Entrepreneurial Event. However, these models can be improved. Indeed, they assume that intention is a good predictor of behavior, whereas only less than half of the variations in entrepreneurial behavior can be explained by intention. Moreover, models of intention focus only on the antecedents of intention. Our thesis, which consists of four papers, aims to address this shortcoming in order to improve our understanding of the entrepreneurial process. Our objective is to highlight the facilitators that would allow us to effectively move from intention to action. We therefore take up the challenge of partially uncovering the black box that lies between intention and entrepreneurial behavior. We selected commitment and planned intention from the social psychological literature as possible missing links, and tested them in entrepreneurial contexts.Thus, by focusing on the volitional part, our thesis complements models of intention in order to improve our knowledge of the entrepreneurial process. It aims to serve project owners, politicians, teachers and the various actors involved in monitoring entrepreneurs. Indeed, all of them can use what we have highlighted to increase the conversion rate of the entrepreneurial intention. Our objective is to propose new material to help project leaders realize their intentions, but the size of our samples limits our empirical studies to exploratory studies. Our results must now be confirmed quantitatively.