The Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment in the Relationship between Perceived Social Support and Entrepreneurial Spirit of Undergraduate Students at the University of Birjand

The current study aimed to investigate the mediating role of psychological empowerment in the relationship between perceived social support and entrepreneurial spirit of undergraduate students at the University of Birjand. The research method was descriptive-correlational, and the statistical population included 8,304 undergraduate students at the University of Birjand. A simple random sampling method was used to select 380 students. The Zimet et al. (1988) Social Support Questionnaire, Spritzer and Mishra's (1995) Psychological Empowerment Questionnaire, and Vatan-Khah and Rezaeimoghaddam's (2015) Entrepreneurial Spirit Questionnaire were used to measure perceived social support, psychological empowerment, and entrepreneurial spirit, respectively. The content validity of the questionnaires was confirmed by experts, and their reliability was assessed using Cronbach's alpha coefficient. The structural equation modeling showed that when perceived social support was considered as the predictor variable and entrepreneurial spirit was the criterion variable, the model had a good fit and the relationship between the components of perceived social support and entrepreneurial spirit was significant at the level of 0.05. The findings regarding the mediating variable indicated that psychological empowerment played a mediating role.