Mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between perceived social support and entrepreneurial spirit of undergraduate students at University of Birjand

The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between perceived social support and the entrepreneurial spirit of undergraduate students at University of Birjand. The research method was descriptive-correlational and the statistical population consisted of 8304 undergraduate students of University of Birjand, that 340 people by using simple random sampling were selected. The Perceptual Social Support Questionnaire (Zimet et al., 1988), Spreitzer and Mishra Psychological Empowerment Questionnaire (1995), and the Patrice and Attitude Entrepreneurship Questionnaire (1394) were used.Content validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by experts. The construct validity of the scales was examined using confirmatory factor analysis. Regarding the structural equation model, when the perceived social support variable was considered as the predictor variable and the entrepreneurial spirit was the criterion variable, the model was well fitted and the relationships between perceived social support and entrepreneurial spirit were significant at the level of 0.05.